Kidnapped

In to the light

What does it mean to be dead? What happens when your heart stops beating? Is there something beyond death or is there only nothingness?

I´ve asked myself those questions before, as I imagine almost everyone do at some point in their lives. I´m not, nor have I ever been, a person with faith in a religion. I have no faith in heaven or hell. No faith in rebirth. I´ve never had an answer to these questions.

Then I thought that I was dead, and what I saw, I was sure must have been some kind of afterlife. Imagine a green field, endless, with more flowers than you could ever imagine. The warm wind made the grass move like waves. The air smelled like all the things I loved most. Like summer rain. Like our family´s cabin. Like my grandfathers cooking. Like James. All these different smells together and I could make out every single one of them. Together they smelled a thousand times better. The sun was just coming down, the sky had a glorious pink color. The clouds that flew past me each had the shape of someone dear to me.

I started to walk, just because I felt like it, and just because it was a wonderful day. Birds flew past me, but not before stoping and making small talk. They were as dear to me as long lost friends.

I loved the feel of the wind in my hair, for it was long again, almost down to my waist. Minutes past, which seemed like such a short time and yet it felt like an eternity. Time was not as it should have been. It was just me and the beautiful landscape around me, forever.

The day turned into night. I´ve been awake many nights in my Life. Countless of times I´ve taken Jonas outside in the middle of the night, just talking away his pain until the sun came up. The night have always been beautiful in my eyes, though I have never seen or felt anything as beautiful as that. The stars on the sky shone brighter, almost in a silvery light, and lit up everything around me. The moon was bigger and brighter than I had ever seen it before. I felt certain that if I only reached out a bit further I would be able to touch it.

My feet felt light as air as I just kept on walking. You would think that after an eternity of just walking and walking, my feet would be a little sore. But no, they just kept walking. No pain at all.

I wasn´t at all surprised to find a gigantic oak tree to my left, all of a sudden. It felt natural. Like it had always been there, even though it had appeared out of the blue just a few seconds before. It was lit up by the moon and the stars and appeared to be glowing in the dark. I felt myself drawn to that tree for some reason, like the answers to all the worlds questions where hidden by the roots of it.

When I came closer, I could hear faint whispers coming from the tree. I took a few more steps until I was standing close enough to touch it. The voices became louder, but not loud enough to hear what they were saying so I took one more step and leaned my head against the stem of the tree.

Voices. Billions of voices. They echoed painfully in my head and where impossible to clear out. I couldn´t make out what they were saying yet I knew that each and every one was important.

"This is the tree of voices", a voice behind me said. I turned around and saw a little girl, no more than five or six years old. She was standing there in front of me in a blue velvet dress, the color of the sky. She had shoulder leangth hair, straight and without color. Her eyes were too big for the rest of her body and piercing blue. Her skin was so pale that you could very clearly make out the veins underneath it. I had never seen anyone quite like her before, but there was somethin oddly beautiful about her. Something inside of her that showed on the outside.

"Who are you?" I asked and was surprised by the clear softness of my own voice. It seemed to echo all around us in the empty night.

"My name is Nadia", the girl said. "What is yours?"