SOMETHING DIFFERENT
The second time she pushed me under, I knew she wasn't kidding. The third time... well, that's how I drowned.
My sister felt bad about it, of course. Maybe "bad" isn't quite it. She let the guilt of that day rule her life. Yes, it's fair to say that she was trying to kill me, and that maybe there ought to be some small measure of guilt that she succeeded, but she meant to kill me in the way that a ten-year-old means to do anything—just to see if they can.
Anyway, I wish she would quit it with the crying and the drugs and all that. I don't regret a thing.
Unless you've died, you're not going to have any clue what I'm talking about, but that's okay. Someday you'll thank me.
First, there's the world gone bright thing. The sides of your vision close in on you, and it does indeed look remarkably like a light at the end of a tunnel. But you're not going anywhere. That's just your brain going dark from lack of air.
Next, you realize how stupid the whole body thing is. You don't need it. Maybe you never did. Sure, some of them stick around, afraid they'll get sucked to heaven or hell or who knows if they leave it behind. Some advice—if you're that attached, the best thing you can do is get out of there. That thing's about to suffer all manner of humiliation and abuse, and you really don't want to be there when it does.
There are some things you can't unsee, you know? And you probably don't want to spend the rest of forever thinking about them.
Finally... here you are. You're not a ghost, not exactly. You're just energy—energy that hasn't decided what it wants to be next. Some do stay this way, it's true. And if you really put your mind to it I suppose you could move curtains, turn lights on and off. But why?
You have options now. You could be a baby again—lots do that. But you can also become a patch of grass, stretching high to drink in that delicious sunlight. You could be that sunlight, even, caressing the entire Earth. You could be molton hot lava bursting out of some volcano no one can prounounce the name of. You could be the collision of two plates that squeezed the lava to the surface.
Do you get it? Do you see? I didn't die. And neither will you.
We just get to be something different now.