State of Heart

The House at the End of Vine Street

I died.

Once.

I died once.

Well, I almost died once, but that's nowhere nearly as beguiling as the real thing. I mean, who wants to listen to the story about the guy who only almost died? No one because he only almost saw the light. He only almost crossed over. He only almost kicked the bucket. In the end, his almost pales in comparison to the guy who actually kicked the bucket. The guy who actually crossed over. The guy who actually saw the light. The guy who actually died. My almost is not his actually.

And as humans, we all have these strange and twisted fascinations with our own mortalities. It's as if we've been conditioned through the media to be entranced by the idea of fatality. We see it everywhere; in movies, reports on the evening news, in books, in videogames, and hear it in the lyrics of songs played on the radio. Death and imageries associated with it can be seen everywhere in our daily lives. So, it's no wonder why we are so fixated on the morbid captivations of death.

We're biologically designed to be curious about it.

Maybe that same grim interest was what almost led me to my own demise. Or maybe it was my own adolescent stupidity that made me almost meet my own doom. Then again, maybe it was a little bit of both. After all, I was young, dumb, and curious and a combination of all three can spell nasty outcomes. Well, they can, though mine was only a circumstance of almost. After all, I only almost died.

Almost.

Just like others, my curiosity had been nourished over the years by countless movies, books, and games, fueling my sense of adventure and exploration as a teenager. At the ripe age of sixteen, I was recklessly fearless and constantly trespassing on abandon property with the spirit of exploration pumping through my juvenile veins. I believed I was invincible and unstoppable -that nothing could stand in my way. As a teenager, I was on top of the world. At least, that was what I believed.

In the end, I wasn't invincible. I wasn't like a man of steel who could reflect bullets off his chest. I wasn't unstoppable. In the end, much like everyone else, I was just as fragile and breakable. I wasn't immortal and it took testing my limits to find that out. And, of course, I regretted it. I regretted it so damn much.

The things I saw and heard during those twilight hours I can never forget. Even after ten years, I still wake up in a cold sweat every night from the nightmares that dance behind my eyelids. The images of rotting corpses and shrieking skeletons will always be burned into my memory, forever leaving me terrified of cemeteries and simple funerals. And I'll always shudder at the sight of decaying buildings left to be reclaimed by nature because that is where evil forces lurk.

True evil forces.

The things I saw were not like the scenes from horror films. Slashers pale in comparison to what I saw. In that abandoned house deep in the woods that was left to decompose over the many years at the end of Vine Street lays a dark past. A past that should not be resurrected for any reason and especially not out of stupid teenage curiosity. If only I knew that beforehand.

There used to be a neighborhood once upon a time ago that sat on what was known as Vine Street. To outsiders, it looked like any other neighborhood. There were extravagant houses furnished with the time's most expensive luxuries and a sense of entitlement that went with such exquisite lifestyles. Anyone who was anyone lived or wanted to live on Vine Street. However, that was just the façade that the residents were said to live there wanted outsiders to believe. In the end, beneath all the money and things, Vine Street was not what it was presenting itself to be.