The Unseen Love of a Lifetime

Cody's Point of View

I've been dead for a lengthy amount of time. I lost my life when I was seventeen years old. I never even had an actual opportunity to experience the world and all that it offered to people like me. So now I spend every damned day in the house I'd wanted to get away from my entire life.

I have my mother to thank for that. As soon as she heard I was going to leave, she decided that it was her duty to make sure I couldn't leave if I tried. She stopped me when I was on my way out the door, and broke one of her oh-so precious liquor bottles over my skull. I hit the ground hard.

I couldn't move, and I couldn't breathe. I was terrified. I heard my mother walk away and light a cigarette. I listened as the bathroom door creaked shut before I blacked out.

I woke up in my bed. Sitting up and getting out of it, I felt the back of my head with my fingertips. No blood. It wasn't even sore.

I crept to my door and peeked out of my bedroom door, looking for any sign of my mother. I didn't see her, so I stepped into the hallway and looked through her bedroom doorway. She wasn't there.

I looked in the bathroom. I think I knew in the back of my mind that she was there. I had no choice but to look. And there she was, laying on the bathroom floor. She was pale and I automatically knew what happened when I saw the empty painkiller bottles on the linoleum floor.

My head started spinning, and I ran to the kitchen and jumped over a blur of junk on the floor to throw up in the sink. I stood with my head in the sink for what felt like an eternity, not knowing what to do or who to call. Eventually, I stood up straight and stepped away from the sink before stopping in my tracks at what I saw.

I was laying on the kitchen floor, completely still. But that was impossible. I was standing against the sink. What was happening?

I felt nauseous, so I sat on the kitchen floor. The wood was cold.

I just kept staring at my own lifeless body for an hour or so, in a daze, until I heard a knock at the door.

Mechanically, I stood up, blood rushing to my head in the process, and opened the door. My aunt Xya was standing in the doorway.

Xya looked around, confused. "Hello? Bellatrix? Cody?"

Oh no. This wasn't going to be good. How would she react to my dead mother? Shit. What should I do?

"Aunt Xya, I'm right here."

She didn't respond in the slightest.

"Aunt Xya?"

Nothing.

Xya walked through the living room, thankfully not looking into the kitchen, and immediately spotted my mother on the floor where I'd left her. I must have forgotten to shut the bathroom door. She let out a scream that could wake the whole city, and didn't stop.

"Aunt Xya, stop!" I stepped directly in front of her, but it was as if she could stare right through me. It was like her eyes were still glued to my mother's corpse.

She finally stopped screaming and started fishing for something in her purse. She pulled out her phone and dialed 911.

I sat on the plush living room couch while my aunt talked into the phone. It was obvious she wasn't going to acknowledge my existence.

It took me a long time to realize that I was dead. I guess I was in denial, or maybe I just lack basic reasoning skills. Either way, it took three days for me to figure it out.

The paramedics and police officers came and went. My house was now a crime scene. They took away the bodies of me and my mother. I kept trying to talk to them, but they literally kept walking right through me. I overheard them decide that it had been a murder-suicide. I was confused at the time. I wasn't really dead, was I?

I tried to follow them out of the front door, but I physically could not step through the doorway. It was as if I was running into a glass wall every time I tried to leave.

I eventually gave up. I went up to my bedroom and flopped face first onto it and stayed there. I don't know how long I laid there before I just drifted off into a half-conscious state of nonexistence.