A Million Stars Apart

Chapter 22

Today is my surgery day. I could feel my heart pounding out of my chest as I watched them prep me to go to the O.R. Kyle and my mom stood by my side trying to make sure I didn't freak out too much. I appreciated the effort but it wasn't helping.

"We ready to go?" The surgeon came in to ask just as they finished prepping me and putting a hideously blue bonnet on my head even though I have basically no hair. I shook my head in agreement as they began to take me away. My mom kissed me on my head and I was off.

Kyle walked beside me until he couldn't go any further. I could start to feel some of the drugs they gave me kick in.

I tried to keep my eyes open as they rolled me into the bright operating room. Dread was weighing me down heavily, and I looked around frantically for Kyle's familiar face one last time, scared that image would be burned into my mind forever.

"No matter what-" I rasped out as the huge machines seemed ready to take apart what was left of my fragile body. Kyle tried to grab my hand but a person in scrubs held him back. 

"I'll always-" My tongue felt useless, unable to shape the most important words billowing up from the deepest part of me, trying to escape.

Love you. More than anything in existence combined. With every tiny piece of me fighting against the end since the beginning of time.

But the words stuck in my dry throat, the farewell message smothered before I could voice it. I could only watch helplessly as Kyle's face twisted in anguish, reading the unspoken truth blazing in my eyes as they bullied my bed through the intimidating doorway.

Those were the last real-world images etched into my conscious mind before the heavy procedures kicked in. Restraints clamped down as a plastic, medicinal mist clouded my senses. Rows of bright overhead lights seared away the last pieces of my identity, stripping everything to just the physical. 

Soon, even that fell away into an empty void - an abyss of nothingness where I couldn't sense any time or shape or self. Just pure peaceful emptiness embracing what had once been me in its velvety oblivion.

Then the roaring clamor of reality ripped out like a birth-scream from the void, assaulting every nerve with its unholy noise. 

White. Blinding white light, tearing every layer apart at the tiniest level while alarms screamed their cataclysmic warnings all around.

Burnt smells of plastic and electricity, the sickening stench of flesh charring in ways it should never bend or warp.

I tried to escape back into the empty void, to splinter off from this profane unmaking, but was tied to the cataclysm. This shrieking body, remaking in the fires of catastrophic system failure. 

Pain bloomed, red overtaking the whiteness in grotesque folds as nerves awoke to the relish of being steadily unmade. How many ways could the human form find destruction - shattering, flaying, burning, melting as one? The final frontier of annihilation's sadistic creativity.

Consumed by the ever-blooming explosion, I convulsed and twitched to its uniquely hellish rhythm. Strange animalistic cries of torment, unprocessed through any rational mind, shredded from my distending throat. My atoms were evaporating, my component parts destabilized...yet stubbornly, blasphemously reassembling into some taunting mockery of their former natural pattern.

The pristine white instruments and people hovering all around dissolved into charred grotesqueries and howling, swirling voids of dark emptiness. Somewhere spanning eternities, that final comforting face shone its searing light from a distant shore I strained to reach.  

I love you, I love you, I tried to push out with every wildly firing nerve and involuntary muscle spasm. I love you with every scattered, unraveling piece of me... 

Burning through the point of no return, I crossed over into the abyss of non-existence. There would be only glitches and senselessness from here until the end. 

But if only that infinite love - furious and constant, yearning to beat the void at its own cruel game - could remain long after the last traces of me dissipated into the ether.