The Great Game (2019)

11

The world falls away. All I see is Emma, through warped layer of blue. I think I'm underwater, but that has to be impossible because I'm breathing.

I try to make my way towards Emma, but my legs don't seem to answer to the command. I move my hands out before me and the movement is sluggish, as if I'm parting water with my arms.

It hits me.

I am parting water. I'm breathing and I'm alive, but I'm drowning and miles deep within the ocean. I open my mouth but no words come out. There is only a string of bubbles, rising along the murky blue. Emma stands before me, her face painted by the strokes of sunlight that manage to sink through the water's tides.

"Hello, Chase." Her smile is strangely hypnotic and I'm not sure how she's speaking to me underwater. I try to say something, but everytime I open my mouth, water would flood the opening and ropes of bubbles would emerge.

I shake my head, trying to convey all the words I cannot say.

"Don't bother, wasting your tiny little actions on me." Emma draws forwards, her movements oddly graceful in the blue-grey depths of the ocean. The distance between us closes and I can see her clearly, her face a portrait of the sunlight's slanted threads, alligned with the blue tangents the water draws along the curve of her lips.

"Doesn't this feel so right?" Emma arches her brows, her expression carefully closed and thoughtful. I bring my shoulders into a shrug, scared to even blink, fearful that she might disappear within seconds.

"I know that you regret it now, but in the moment you did it, didn't it feel like the right thing? After all, you were a malfunction and I couldn't save you- no one could. The only way to eradicate that terrible fact was to erase yourself from the world."

Underwater, the tears don't come. Still, I can feel the hollow sensation that kicks in before the common flood of tears. The raw itchiness of my throat, the air being compressed in my lungs as my chest fills up with anguish, stifled sobs.

"You know, I had to deal with you being on the news for weeks. It was the worst part of leaving you and sometimes, I wondered what I even saw in you." It feels like I'm staring at Emma through a mirror. We're so close, our chests are nearly touching, but there's a glass barrier that stands between us. It blurs the expression on her face, makes her features seem less real, less sharp than what they're supposed to be.

"And if you were alive, if you had somehow survived through it, I would have asked you one question," Emma peers at me like I'm a foreign species of plant or animal that she has never seen before, "Would you do it again?"

My mouth is parched when I stare at her, through that invisible glass. I want to bring my hands up to check if the surface is present because- how can it not? There's no way Emma is standing before me, breathing and speaking through the calm passage of the sea. This has to be an alternate reality, a cruel game.

Emma laughs softly, the noise faint and tingling. Her eyes soften when she sees the look on my face. "You don't need to say a word, Chase," She says softly, "Just nod or shake your head."

My hands itch towards the base of my throat, where the distant echos of my heart's frantic pounding quivers, a trilling melody being played through speakers.

Emma frowns at my moment of hesitation. "You shouldn't have to think about it. Hasn't your time at the Medium taught you anything?"

It hasn't, not really. All it has done was shown me how twisted afterlife was. How disgustingly artificial people remained, even after going through life's rollercoaster. All I have learned is that nobody actually learns anything from life. All we do is enter the world, clueless, and leave the world just as clueless.