I'd been dead only an hour.
Just long enough for the room to forget my name.
Long enough for the fan to keep turning as though it had always spun for itself and not for the body beneath it.
Death, I found, was not thunder.
It was administrative.
An unbuttoning. Sickening!
A soft closing of tabs in the mind.
The clock kept chewing the seconds.
And somewhere outside, a car horn argued with traffic.
A woman laughed like the world had not misplaced anything.
I hovered,
well, not in white, nor light
just in the stale air of my own bedroom,
watching my phone blink with notifications
from people who would say “you never replied”, as if the silence were a choice.
Strange, the things that survive you.
Dust. Unsent drafts. A half-drunk cup of water still sweating onto the bedside table like it, too, was nervous.
I tried to feel afraid but fear belongs to the breathing.
What I felt instead was inconvenience.
I had just begun to understand how to forgive myself for staying too long in places that did not love me back.
I’d been dead only an hour and already the world was rearranging its furniture around my absence. That is the cruelest part, not the leaving, or the quiet but how easily everything continues.