I Loved You at Your Darkest

I died once before. My heart stopped beating. I was dead for two minutes. It does not matter how it happened. It’s simply a fact. What matters happened to me after I had died. I can only summarize my clinical death as similar to going to sleep. A gradual slipping of consciousness until nothing remains. No pain, no struggle, a smooth transition from the state of mindfulness to the state of mindlessness.

I was out until I wasn’t. Flashing lights flared against my eyelids, softly disturbing my rest. At first, I felt like I was just waking up again, regaining consciousness slowly. Slowly, time passed, and I could hear very abrupt and loud noises exploding in the distance. I still could not open my eyes, nor did I want to. This state of mindlessness felt so comfortable, so right. More time passed and eventually, a manic screech forced me to open my eyes.

Impossible shades and shapes collided mercilessly with my retinas. I shut my eyes, but the light still penetrated through. The screeching noise got louder and more frequent. I tried moving, but found myself stuck in place. I opened my eyes once more, just barely. Attempting to make sense of what was happening, but the bombardment of alien shades and shapes assaulted my vision again. The colors and lights restricted it greatly.

I stayed motionless some more time, attempting to survive the onslaught of photonic violence unleashed upon me. Sometime later, I felt myself moving. I was moving on top of something gelatinous and slimy. I tried moving once more, but to no avail. My mind felt numb and careless. My body tried moving, but nothing came of it. The more I urged myself to move, the stiffer I felt. Almost as if small hands were holding me in place.

The screaming got louder, more desperate, and more frequent. Accompanied by awful crunching sounds. I closed my eyes again, hoping to wake up from this strange dream or sleep through it and forget it. Everything seemed to grow dimmer and disappear into the distance once more.

The rough sound of saliva being rolled inside a titanic throat rolled this strange dreamland back to my attention. Followed by the worst pain imaginable shooting through my legs. I felt every molecule in my legs being shredded, burned, frozen, and crushed at the same time. My mouth must’ve screamed on its own as I opened my eyes. I already hear my voice tearing through what seemed like the infinite space of impossible hues in impeccable shapes. The visage of a monstrosity beyond reason or logic, a bubbling - smoke-like and flaming Canid Draconian chimera’s head greeted my vision. Bigger than anything should be even possible. Shifting and swaying, drifting about, spanning infinite dimensions and spaces. A million piercing eyes swimming in the center of its face aimlessly staring in all directions. Its gargantuan jaws locked tightly around my legs. A black radiant liquid flowed out of this maw I was about to be sucked into. A tongue protruded through the mountain-sized fangs spanning into probable infinitely underneath me.

My screams wouldn’t stop. The pain in my legs went from unfathomably excruciating to nonexistent as my skin caught on fire and the blood in my veins turned to ice.

“Why are you screaming?” A voice from nowhere and everywhere called out to me.

I thought I was going insane. No longer being able to handle this, I wanted out of this nightmare. I tried moving and speaking. Anything I tried, nothing happened. Somehow, my body wouldn’t respond, frozen beyond time. Alone, partially consumed by a predatory animal of cosmic proportions.

“Why are you screaming?” The voice asked again, almost driving me insane with its resonance. It was so close, yet so far. Unbearably present yet absent, almost imaginary while still true. “You should feel nothing now, so why are you screaming?” it asked again.

The voice wasn't wrong, I did feel nothing at that moment. The pain was gone. I didn't know why I was screaming. I still don't know, Maybe the shock, maybe this thing in front of me just forced me to scream somehow. I simply don't know.

I wanted to scream out at the voice to stop, to go away. I wanted to scream out something with words. This whole torturous nightmare had to stop, but I couldn’t do anything to make it stop. I just stayed in place, frozen, feeling the voice echoing through me, through my brain, inside my brain. It was bouncing against my skull. Scratching at my cranial walls, picking, and prodding where it irritated the most.

My mind was becoming liquid, and I was losing my grip on everything. I cried. Internally, I begged to know what was going on. I pleaded for it to stop. Weeping to be awoken. The voice from nowhere and everywhere spoke yet again.

“You are dying,” it said.

This couldn’t be right. I knew I had merely fallen asleep, taken a quick break from the hike. I felt tired and laid down. Nothing more. This had to be a dream. This had to be a nightmare. Maybe it was the cold, maybe it was the exhaustion. I didn’t know what to make of it. However, I protested the notion of me dying inside my head.

“You are half dead; your soul doesn’t belong here yet. You are a mistake in these parts of the universe,” the voice said, coming from multiple directions, dizzying me.

“W-what is going on?” I questioned, not expecting anything to even come out of my mouth.

The voice repeated itself, “You are half dead; you don’t belong here yet. A mere mistake in these parts of the universe. It is not yet your time to undergo the painful metamorphosis. They are still fighting for you in your part of the cosmos. Return to your physical form,” it spoke.

“What are you?” I quipped, hoping for some sort of explanation. A loud static noise assaulted my ears. The impossible noise was so loud and violent it formed cracks in the indescribable scenery around me. A blinding white light shot through the cracks, forcing me to shut my eyes forcefully and hope for the best.

The static noise only seemed to grow louder and louder until I could no longer do anything. The white light seemed to fade away along with my hearing. I opened my eyes once more, only to end up lying upside down in a painfully colorless room. Everything seemed upside down and inside out and spinning in odd directions, including myself.

Protruding from my abdomen was a swirling mass of luminescent blackness. I screamed again and swatted at it, but my arm went straight through it. In my panicked state, I twisted and turned, and the black mass danced along with my movements, still unmoving from my body. Even if this was just a dream, it was too frightening… It was too real… That moment finally forced me to accept that I was indeed dying.

I cried and begged for another chance, pleading and begging for forgiveness for any type of sin I might’ve committed. Of course, I wanted more time to live. I didn’t want to die. Nobody does. I was young and couldn't accept dying just like that. If there was something beyond the limitations of my reality with a sliver of intelligence, I should be able to reason it with. That’s what I thought at least.

The strange voice from nowhere and everywhere ignored my tantrum and merely spoke again, finally answering my question. Its tone poured like rain into my brain. “I am nothing, a drop in the sea of the cosmic black magnetic liquid. A minuscule piece of the ever-expanding universal dark matter. The nothingness and the wholeness, the alpha and the omega. The…”

I broke it off, “Are you God?”

The voice spoke again, this time thundering through my entire body. “I am God. You are God. Everything is God and God is everything. The universe is God. Cosmos is God. God is All and nothing. Existence and Oblivion. God is Reality, seen and unseen, above and below, physical and beyond physical!”

My body shook as the voice rumbled through me.

“H-How are you speaking to me?” I asked, my internal voice trembling.

“I am not. We are merely exchanging information. I am pure information in a quantum sea, and you are information caged inside a physical form.”

I didn’t get any answers that made my predicament any simple or any more understandable. Everything felt too strange, too impossible, and nothing could make any sense of what was going on, but I had the urge to ask again, “What was that th-thing that bit through m-my legs?” I asked with a quivering voice again.

“The gate.”

“The gate to wh-what?” I questioned hesitantly.

“The gate between the limitations of life and the freedom that lies beyond death. It is the key to the painful metamorphosis. An opening through which all living things set themselves free from the limitations of their bodies and senses. A passage between solitude and unison with everything else in the universe. The path to becoming part of the vast nothing and everything. The road to becoming part of the wider universe, unlimited by physical boundaries.”

My mind felt twisted on its axis from all this talk of universal and cosmic unity. It made absolutely no sense. It went against everything I had ever learned and understood. I began feeling weak, as if I was about to fade away once again, but I had to ask one more question. It was hard to keep my thoughts straight. My mind was fading away, turning into a liquid inside my skull. With the last of my strength, I asked.

“What is the painful metamorphosis?”

The alien voice seemed to grow more distant and yet more present and closer than before, like it was whispering straight into the auditory part of my nervous system. It trailed off as it spoke, “the last moments of pain when the gate tears off all physical limitations from the spirit. When it finally becomes free to reunite with the rest of everything in a union as a single drop of the cosmic black magnetic fluid.”

By the time the voice finally faded away, I could no longer see the white light. Instead, I felt myself descending in an upward spiral at such an immense speed that everything seemed to turn into shapeless and impossible. Strange alien colors danced and faded all around me before everything turned black for a moment.

I finally opened my eyes again, floating above my body in an operating room. The bright lights blinded me and the human voices speaking through surgical masks felt incredibly pleasant to my ears. When I finally adjusted to the lighting and saw the doctor bringing the saw to my body’s legs, my body seized up in fear and disgust. A putrid smell of wet dog fur and rotting flesh finally hit me. The whirring noise of the saw felt like a rain of spears pierced through my spine. The audio-astral pain forced my head down and then I saw that in my ghastly form, my legs were missing below the knee. Forever lost beyond the jaws of the cosmic gate.

A wave of sadness and exhaustion washed over me. I was being crushed under its immense weight and I felt myself sinking lower and lower. I sank until I was once more one with my body.

The first thing I was told when I woke up was that they could save my brain with no long-term damage. The second thing I was told was that my legs had to be amputated. Somehow they turned into practically mummified lumps of blackened skin and liquified black bone that would’ve killed me otherwise. The doctor said he’d never seen such a violent form of gangrenous decay.

I said nothing about my experiences on the other side. I didn’t have the energy to hear any quips about the lack of blood flow to my brain affecting my thinking. Or how it might’ve forced my psyche in odd directions.