There was nothing but darkness surrounding me. Nothing but an endless expanse of thingness, a dull void in the vacuum of Here and Now. At least, that’s what I decided to call it. I’d read something in a book where they called a place like this the Here and Now. Except in the book the land was beautiful and serene, with light twinkling between flittering branches and a bubbling stream flowed underneath a pristine bridge. But this was nothing like that place. In fact, it was the complete opposite.

All around me was a void. I could see nothing and hear nothing as if anything in this land was none existent. I felt ground, but at the same time I didn’t. It was as if I was floating over a solid surface that was there but it was still too far to reach.

I opened my mouth to speak but no words formed on my lips. No sound came from my throat and my eyes widened as I reached up to touch it. The vibration from speech tickled my fingertips as I lightly brushed them across where my voice box would be, but it was as if the sickening darkness was absorbing every sound.

A dull tingling sensation began in my legs, like that feeling you get when your arm is falling asleep. The feeling slowly but surely edged its way up my body, enveloping me in a cocoon with no feeling at all. It was as if I was just an entity floating. I could not move, nor see, nor speak or hear. I was just…there.

At one time I’d been taught to believe there was such thing as Heaven or Hell. That when one dies they are judged by the ultimate power of god and based on their life they are sent to either ever lasting peace, the land of Nirvana or ‘Heaven’, or they are condemned to eternal damnation to serve the devil in Hell. My belief in this subject had gone up in a puff of smoke after my father had died, as he was the one that made me go to church every Sunday. I’d tried fervently to keep up the tradition, to try and keep something that my father and I did together but after a while I just couldn’t.

Funny how dying can bring up the past, because now I was floating here praying that maybe I was just being judged. That this was some type of holding cell until my time had come. Maybe god would overlook the time I slapped Kelly Flynn across the face for saying something to Kye, or the time that I stole that book because my mom refused to buy it for me and I really wanted it.

Isn’t there some sort of buy one innocence card get one free deal?

I’m not sure how long I had been here in this void of nothingness, trapped with the echo of my own thoughts. I thought about my life and what had happened. I’m sure if I could feel anything my body would be trembling with anger, but my chest would be aching with remorse. So many things had happened, things that I wished on no one.

Suddenly, out of the darkness slowly crept a tendril of light. It’s blinding white tentacles crawled across the nothingness, suddenly turning it from night to day. I squinted my eyes and had the faint sensation of tears dribbling down my cheeks from the sight. Closing my eyes I felt as if I was in a roller coaster, doing a free fall downwards from one of the peaks. My stomach lurched and I opened my mouth to scream, but still nothing came out. The light rushed forward and I was covered by it, wrapped in it. It burned my retinas, searing them as I rapidly closed my lids over my tender eyes.