Dead, Formerly

Prologue

I've always had a good memory. Great memory, actually. The kind of memory that earned me strange looks from people when I was able to recall things like their favorite color, book, or some other trivial detail that had been mentioned in passing. The kind of memory that rarely had a lapse, even on the drunkest of nights.

If I were to be asked to recap my life in great detail, I'd definitely be able to do it.

To a point.

It's like this—I remember plenty of things.

My first day of kindergarten, for example, and the commonplace years that came after, spent playing a silly game called Nation-ball on a scorching blacktop. The middle school days are an easily grasped memory, and the high school days are as vivid as the present. It's all there, swirling around in my head, waiting for me to bring up a when the situation calls for it.

But then—when it gets to a certain day—there's nothing.

The day it ends—the day my memory comes to a standstill—isn't exactly a normal day, though. It's the day I spent twelve years working towards.

Graduation.

It's still prominent in my mind—most of it, I mean. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the butterflies fluttering around in my stomach, preparing me for the final speech I'd give to my peers. If I strain my ears, the sound of the graduating class' jubilant cheers still ring loud. If I squint, I can still see the rain of our graduating caps—the last time that we'd disobey our endearingly rigid principal. Remembering details like that is child's play to me.

It's what comes after that I can't quite recall.

Now, that'd be normal if it was just that night. I'm sure that my friends and I had had much more than our fair share of cheap alcohol to celebrate the end of an era. I wouldn't think too much of it at all if it had only been a half a dozen hours that went MIA.

But it wasn't half a night that vanished in my head. It was a month. An entire month. Thirty days. 720 hours. 43,200 minutes. 2,592,000 seconds.

And then, of course, I died.

So that brings us to the present—sort of. There's that decade I spent cryogenically frozen in a tank, but that's trivial.

Or not.

To explain that, though, I'll have to rewind a bit; let's go back a few months before graduation.

I've never been much of a science fanatic, nor have I been all that interested in entering the medical field after graduation. I simply had an extra slot in my schedule and had ended up placed in a human anatomy class. If I were to be truthful here—which I genuinely intend to be—I'll admit that the moments where I enjoyed myself in that course were few and far between. I, to the chagrin of Mrs. Baker, just wasn't a science-y gal.

Even on that day.

You see, Mrs. Baker was a teacher for the students. She loved it whenever she managed to grasp our attention, and, due to that pure hearted joy, she always tried her damnedest at making us intrigued in the course material.

That day, via means far beyond what any of us students could comprehend, Mrs. Baker had managed to drag a team of those who would move on to become world renown doctors and scientists into our classroom as guest speakers.

The curriculum had finally reached its 'Post-Mortem Bodily Functions' part.

See what I'm getting at here?

One of the doctors—Dr. Wright, as I'd come to know much later on—enthusiastically went on about the wonders of science, and how desperately they needed cadavers to spur advancements in the medical field. The sales pitch went on for nearly an hour, and eventually winded down to an eery request.

"Would any of you guys be interested in donating your body to science? I have waivers right here!" Dr. Wright chirps so cheerfully that I almost forgot she was asking for our corpses.

In the room, not a single hand is raised.

Dr. Wright's lips tremble. Her hair is frazzled, her eyes disturbingly widened; I knew then that she was just this close to losing it. Not the 'go-run-outside-and-cry-in-her-car' kind of losing it, but rather a 'snap-and-quite-possibly-make-us-all-candidates-for-cadavers' kind of losing it.

Reluctantly, I raise a hand. "I'll sign one."

Bada-bing, bada-boom.

Just like that—three measly words spoken out of absolute pity for the overworked doctors.

Just like that, my entire life—entire afterlife—is changed.

I hadn't been privy to the fact that signing the damn contract didn't just give them jurisdiction to turn me into a pin-cushion for aspiring medical students. It gave them the right to turn me into a botched up result of human madness, too.

And four months and ten years later, I awoke to my second round of life.