Ten Minutes to the Last Line

Author's Notes:

This is a brief piece of writing I worked on for an extra-curricular class a couple of years ago. We had been asked to write our thoughts on how the last ten minutes of our lives might be like and this is my take on the matter. 

The piece contains mentioned of suicide/suicidal thoughts, self-harm, self-hatred, depression and mental illness. Nothing is explicitly described, but be warned.

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They say that Time is relative. At times, it seems to flood so fast that you almost don't realise that it's passed till it's too late. Other times, instead, every second feels like a century. And then there is that sensation, even more unsettling, rarer to be felt, the one that makes a minute last at the same time for a moment and for an eternity. I think that this one is the dominating sensation you experience when your life is about to meet its end. Time both speeds up and dilates and that cold certainty grows inside you. It's the same awareness that walks by your side for all the time of your existence, but that you can usually so easily forget, ignore, chase away. The certainty that our being isn't eternal, that one day our world, as we know and perceive it, will cease to exist and us with it. When the end approaches, that feeling seems no more so distant and alien. You can almost touch it, as it fuses with your consciousness and becomes undeniable.

I've often heard that people see their life running before their eyes when they are about to die. And I've also heard about that light that others swear to have seen during near-death experiences. There are so many theories that can explain both facts, scientifically, but everything I can feel and think now are just blurry thoughts. Emotions that are at the same time intense and too far away. Maybe they are truly part of a memory, of scenes from the life I have lived. It's weird how it's always much easier to immerse yourself in the mistakes and in the regrets, while the brightest parts often remain so incredibly fleeting, even now that I have, at the same time, all the time of the world and not enough to cease to breathe. Or, perhaps, I'm simply starting to lose the contact with reality, for the last time. Will I be pain? Will I panic? Or will I just feel resignation and numbness? A bit of everything, or at least that's what it seems. Survival instinct is like hope, after all. It's always, or almost, the last to die, even when the certainty of the end is unescapable. The sensation is the same, confusing and disorienting, gifted by the double perception of time. A static peace and a desperate agitation, the simultaneous need to fight and to let go. It's like being torn in two from the inside, as if there were two forces pulling in opposite directions with the same strength. Which one will win? And does it really matter now?

Pain seems like an inevitable reality, at this point. It doesn't matter if I died in my sleep, in a hospital bed, on the floor of a random building or on the asphalt of a road, from illness, in an accident, by my own hand or by someone else's. Leaving life can't be a painless process. It burns, under any circumstance, as only ice can do, no matter if there is actual, physical pain or not. It burns when breathing becomes harder and harder, more and more inaccessible. It burns when your heartbeat grows weaker and weaker, more and more imperceptible, more and more useless. When the air no longer wants to leave the lungs, when the blood struggles more and more to keep flooding. Is it weird that I can clearly see it now, my blood, in my arteries, in my veins, but also on the outside, all around, much darker and denser than it should be?

How much time has passed? I can't tell. However, I know that it comes a moment when not being able to breath anymore becomes almost as natural as having to constantly doing it was before. I can feel my body convulsing, to grasp the insufficient dose of oxygen of these last breaths, but now it's dark all around and my same skin feels like it doesn't belong to me anymore. This is when the visions, the questions come, be them the fruit of one last, desperate attempt to cling to life and give it a meaning, or simply the effects of the ongoing brain hypoxia. Is there something, in the aftermath? And if yes, what could it be? Did I really live this existence, or is this just the slow ending of a dream? And, anyway, was it worth it? No matter how many times I have wondered, no matter if I have already, somehow, chosen my answers, now I feel like this is the first time I'm faced with these inquiries. And there are no answers, and there is no time to find them. I'm condemned to fade away into uncertainty.

What comes next is silence, a silence so deep and utmost as I've never heard before and as I will never hear it again. It's not just absence of sounds, but of every sensation. Absence of thought.