Deathless

Part I-Death

Death. I think this was death that I had experienced. No feeling of your pulse, this immobility of flesh, this inability to breathe, was this really death? I heard sounds which felt like echoing to me from a great distance while my consciousness was melted in a world of darkness and light.

“Gods! Mark's dead!” It was Isabel, my sister's voice. I heard her weep in melancholy, “He's dead! My god! Dead!!”

Mom and dad had already died of an illness just so recently, leaving us siblings to survive life all by ourselves. Then I got this strange illness they had, and thinking I will be fine, I didn't let my mourning and sick-worried Isabel call the doctor this late night and postponed it to tomorrow. She had argued but finally had submitted. That tomorrow will never come now. I regretted my decision. Else I wouldn't have died at 17-years of age. I didn't want to die so young nor die leaving my sister to suffer all alone!

All I thought of doing that time was hug her and assure that I wasn't dead. I think was I only paralyzed at that time, my body gone into a deep stasis while my sanity prevailed. But how could I be surviving if my heart had stopped beating? If I wasn't breathing yet not suffocated?

I felt bad leaving her like this. I didn't want her to be left alone in a cruel world. I wanted to STAY!!!

The doctor came soon after being called by Isabel, and I was relieved that soon she would find that I was alive. She touched my wrist, felt my chest, and then declared, “I am sorry, but he's dead. When did he die?” Bitch!!! You should have proceeded to a careful examination! I was not dead!! My insults and curses remained choked in my throat, unable to erupt and kill this bitch with their magnitude!

“An hour ago.” Isabel sobbed more louder.

Days passed and no hunger and no thirst bugged me except for the fact I wasn't able to struggle, get out of this state with force, comfort Isabel as I was being proceeded into a coffin, soon to be given a burial!

“I am not dead! Help me!” I wanted to yell, but my tongue nor my lips complied to my order. What was happening?!

Isabel, today, had dressed me with all her tenderness, her hands caressing against mine, her tears frequently raining on me as she don me in my favorite clothes, which I could tell so after all I wore them all the time once a special occasion comes by. I grieved in silence as I longed to get up, hug her and say, "I am alive!" but still I lied there on the cold coffin motionless, powerless, hungry, angry, confronting inertia!

And then they buried me. If such was the torture of soul staying in the body after death, then I was better disembodied from my body and let my soul travel to heaven! I was better cremated than buried!

I could feel the gravity increasing as I heard a thousand voices roaring, “Arise!!!” and after what felt like a century of days, I woke up to feel the pleasure of a pulse. One beat, two beats, and it went up to a hundred beats. I was able to breathe again.

I tried to scream at first, but I failed. I had lost voice?! No! Impossible! I panicked! I was buried in a coffin!

Peril shook me, but I collected my calm and remained reflect. I felt around the planks above and below. There was a good space for enough mobility to move my arms around with tolerable ease, push the planks off and escape this place.

I pressed and tried to push the boards above with my legs, knees, my arms and all, pushing the hardness of the box that had me imprisoned within it. Mental torture took me in my rage after I tried too hard and not even a creak was heard, still unrelentingly kicking the coffin, my delirium almost at its peak. Until I heard the creak.

At last, after a divine effort I had pushed the damn lid off and was then meet with a landslide of dirt. I wasn't buried too deep, so the earth that fell on me was less than I had expected. I displaces through and now was sitting atop an open grave. I was well and alive!

I looked around. Nobody was around. I sighed a breath of relief! I was safe and sound! I was alive!

My first idea was to find the custodian of this cemetery and have that guy conduct me back to home. But—recalling that I had died, declared dead by a bitchy doctor, my return would only cause unwanted alarm. Why should I be hurrying while being the master of this situation?

I firstly walked out of the cemetery, fully attired in the clothes my sister don me in the day I was buried. It was morning and dawn had just broke, the sun proceeding itself to noon soon.

I walked along a deserted street, and soon meet a pedestrian, a man of around thirty, a bit of distrust glimmering in his eyes, as I walked to him as I asked him, “Hello. What's the date, mister?”

“Don't you know, boy?” he said, “It's a Sunday! 17th May, 2020!”

17th May, 2020?!! Did this madman know what was he blabbering? He had already left from the spot, continuing to jog. I wanted to argue that it was still 1993! The year I died! No, it couldn't be happening! I couldn't have been lying dead in the coffin for years without food and light! How did my body persist for so long without being decayed by time?

What seemed impossible was happening. With me, that is.

I walked back into the cemetery and went near to my grave. Next to it was Isabel's and my parents' graves. They had all died. All expect me.

I walked in daze, time flowing like a raging tsunami, as I was left thinking what really had happened with me as I looked around me, skyscrapers everywhere, planes flying up in the skies: the usual squalor of cities now that I have gotten acquainted with.

No form of physical suffering—be it hunger, suffocation, thirst, pain, injury—can ever harm me for I think I have become immortal, become deathless and preserved in my 17-years-old body for no real purpose. I can possibly train and cultivate my mental heath with yoga and mediation to the point of not being able to get stressed out.

Death no longer frightens me. The fear of Death died along with my family. But now it seems like Death is no longer interested in me. It doesn't care for me anymore like I was nothing for It now.

And sometimes I fear that I have been just... forgotten onto Earth.