I choked to death on a piece of hamburger, c'mon. Eating, breathing and drinking through the same hole in our bodies is indeed just stupid design, as Neil deGrasse Tyson once said.

It happened during a party at my grandmother's. I was eating alone upstairs while playing video games. It wasn't even a huge bite, but when I realised that I couldn't swallow it, I got nervous and made it worse because I aspirated some of that shit, completely blocking my throat and my bronchial tubes. I tried to run downstairs as fast as I could, but the only thing my family saw was a skinny and pale teenager walking like a zombie, wide-eyed and looking for help.

Something else I wasn't expecting happened in the middle of my pulmonary aspiration scene—I saw through a window how one of my uncles was outside the house, next to his car and talking to a young school girl. She discreetly looked around and, on the sly, she lifted her skirt up and took her knickers off to put them inside one of my uncle's (leather) jacket pockets, then walked away smiling, blowing him a kiss.

While I was watching that—with my hands scratching and ripping the flesh out of my neck—I missed the last step and fell down in front of everyone with a series of convulsions. I heard their screams and how they rushed to do something about it. I felt someone performing the Heinrich maneuver, and I've just entirely fucked up this part because The Heinrich maneuver is not the first aid procedure, it's the 2007 song by Interpol. Sigh, I don't have correction fluid with me so I'll just continue typing and finish the paragraph.

My bad.

I was saying that I felt someone performing the H e i m l i c h manoeuvre. A large piece of hamburger came out, but I was still unable to breathe. Without any hesitation, my dad took his Montblanc Meisterstück Diamond fountain pen out of his pocket and used it to stab me in the neck to improvise a tracheotomy. It hurt like hell but didn't help whatsoever.

"His lungs are blocked, call an ambulance!"

My lungs started to burn, and in both my fingers and toes began a freezing throbbing pain. Light, shapes, colours, voices, sounds and everything around me slowly started to vanish, then all that blurriness turned dark and cold and absolutely quiet.

Nothingness.

Suddenly, I saw branches. Like blooming snowflakes of gleaming colours. Millions of branches spreading around me, expanding and growing to the size of tunnels. A dim shine started to emerge from all of them, and a moment came when I was surrounded by a bright white light, completely blinded.

I woke up, with frenetic movements and violently gasping.

I was upstairs again at my grandma's, lying on the floor and surrounded by pieces of a broken plate and the rest of my hamburger. I got up and felt very dizzy. The back of my eyes hurt like they were about to explode. I started to remember in detail the choking scene and nervously walked out of the room, asking myself if everything around me was real. I was panting my pockets and the rest of my body, looking for my Suicune coin, moving hunchbacked from side to side.

"I fucking died... What am... Is this... Dad!"

I ran downstairs like a lunatic, and some guests looked at me asking what the fuck was wrong with me, but I was just there talking nonsense and slowly experiencing another anxiety attack. My brother realised the way I was being surrounded by a bunch of yelling elders, so he ran towards me. There were five, maybe six people encircling me—my mom was one of them—but my brother clasped my plaid shirt, and he started to yell while rescuing me. Meanwhile, the party kept going on in the background.

"Look at me, look at me! Breathe. Breathe and tell me what's going on."

"I died!"

"What?"

Many of them heard that and kept talking all at the same time, looking for an explanation.

"I died... I choked to death, and you all saw it... Then I woke up. I came back... and now I'm here... and..."

"What the fuck are you talking about you idiot?" I heard my mom asking while everyone kept talking still at the same fucking time, but being partially muted by the music.

"I died! I died and I..."

"What's going on?" my uncle asked after closing the door behind him.

I died and I...

"I don't know, sweetie. I think our nephew here is having one of his anxiety attacks... Hey, what happened, where were you?" my aunt replied before kissing him—hugging him and then holding his face in a gesture of unquestionably true love.

I died and I...

"Nothing, honey. Just a call from my boss. Someone at the office is..."

I died and I...

I started to walk towards them while that pervert kept talking to my dad's sister, and I put my hand inside his left jacket pocket—that fucking black leather, boiling hot because of the sun outside.

"Hey, what the fuck?!" he yelled trying to stop me, but my hand came out tightly holding a pair of pink knickers. A small wet spot was visible on them, revealing how much that girl was enjoying that conversation with him.

I heard the starting commotion because of that, but as soon as I saw those knickers, my heartbeat went crazy. I felt numb and fainted again in front of the ongoing fight now involving the whole party.

That moment was crucial both for this story to continue and for my family to completely tear apart, but let's not focus on the last one.

But yes, there was now a divorce going on and families being torn apart, so everyone ignored the anaemia I started to develop because I was afraid of eating after that day, but it only took my body around a month to cure it and to start feeling hungry again thanks to a series of daily painful injections. And up to this moment, I still question myself about which one made me want to eat again—the medicine itself or the... needlephobia they caused.

It's called Trypanophobia, I remembered.

The important thing here is that my problems with the realistic dreams, the sleep paralysis, the déjà vus, the anxiety and the depression—all of them worsened. Plus, I started to continuously faint when I was near an accident or a possible death such as drowning, tripping over something, poisoning. Not paying attention when a drug addict teenager was nearby, lurking the night for cell phones and wallets with the help of an ice pick. Not looking both ways before crossing the street. Choking again but with my own goddamned saliva (sigh, c'mon). And many more scenarios.

It was a constant living nightmare because I'm just a fucking idiot and I get distracted so easily. Even for my slightest mistakes I was over and over again experiencing all that pain, cold and darkness and branchy snowflakes—just to wake up again with violent movements and growling while trying to breathe (like if I were drowning in ice cold water). But every time that happened, I was surrounded by people saying that I just fainted, with no sign of a possible death nearby... but I could see how details changed, and it was like coming back to an almost new scenario.

And fainting in public doesn't seem like something you should feel embarrassed for until you realise all the shit involved. Shit as in literally shitting your pants because you can't control your sphincters.

But anyway, it was at the age of eighteen—after some years of medication and many-many sessions with a shrink—when a new element for another possible and even more stupid death showed up in my life. Not only that but that shit strengthened my conscious perception of how this immortality thing works, and in the worst possible way.

I'm talking about drugs.