Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
CHAPTER ONE. paradise on earth
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
NOVA VAN KIRK would often find herself wonderingwhat death would feel like.
The girl would always find her mind drifting to dark and lonely places where the thoughts of a young teenage girl shouldn't even be. Nova would often think about what it must be like to have your life taken away so suddenly, without warning and with so much uncertainty of the afterlife — if there was one. She would also think about the fear one must feel when they are staring death straight in the eyes, the paralysing and desperate look that one gets when faced with death, and how they fight for the life they don't want to desert and leave behind. She would even wonder what it must feel like when death has its hand wrapped tightly around your throat, choking the air out of your lungs as you thrash and do your best to cling onto that last desperate breath of fresh air. Then she wondered what it must feel like as your body finally stops moving all together and the look of life that once burned so brightly in your hopeful eyes becomes nonexistent and is replaced with a blank and lifeless stare, before your wandering soul is trapped in everlasting darkness tarnished in chaos and emptiness.
Nova would even think about the various ways one could die. She could list thousands: sickness, murder, suicide, drowning, accidental overdoses. Nova could go on and on, the girl thinking about what it must be like to lose your life to a natural disease, the flowing ripples of the tide from the ocean, an addictive drug that made everything brighter, or the way death lingered on the sharp tip of a knife or the barrel of a gun. But it wasn't exactly a friendly topic to talk about with friends or at the dinner table with the family. Maybe she should see a therapist and talk about it then, but the girl didn't want people to know how utterly fucked up her curious mind was.
Another thing Nova would often find herself thinking about is how it must feel to die. Now, just to be clear, she doesn't mean it in, like, an I'm broken and want to kill myself kind of way. Nova was just an imaginative teenage girl whose curiosity was sparked by the idea of life and death. The girl would find herself staring back at her reflection in the mirror and asking herself how am I going to die? She wondered if it would be peaceful, like, in her sleep, or if it would be painful, like, a tornado twisting and thrashing her body around until she finally gave up.
