The In-Between

Chapter 1: Rewind

Do you ever wonder about what life or what living is? Do you ever wonder where will we go when the light of our lives gone out?

Because I do.

People always said that they want to go to heaven. What if there is only hell or there are neither hell nor heaven? What if there are neither nirvana nor rebirth? One more question is that how can we know whether we may end up in hell or heaven or reach nirvana or reborn? Maybe there is a place that gets to decide that but people only know about hell and heaven or nirvana and rebirth based on their belief.

When I was ten years old, I first heard the word 'Nirvana' from my grandmother and that is when I started to question myself about life. I asked those questions and tried to search for the answers. My parents, teachers, and friends gave me different answers. I don't know which one of those answers is the real one but they all got their point. Until one day, I was sitting on my bed and I asked myself: Why am I breathing? What is life? Where will my thoughts go when I die? Will there be nothing? Will I reborn with my previous life memories? I repeated those questions over and over again for a couple of minutes till my breathing began to slow down and my mind was lost in my own thought then nothing.

Nothing.

Darkness.

In that split seconds I forgot who I am, what I am, what my name is, where I am. It felt like I just exist, reborn and remember nothing at all. A few seconds later, I could finally remember and became normal again. How could that happened? Maybe I asked my brain some impossible or too complicated questions that it shut itself down.

I told my parents and grandparents about it. They said, "Oh, it's nothing. You're ten years old. You're still too young to dwell on those kind of things. There are many things you should be worry about beside that," and I just let it passed and forgot about it. It's strange how weird thing just happened and everyone still think it's normal, nothing special. If they have experienced that nothingness like me, will they still say it's nothing?