Pure Essence

Looking down from above, you wonder at the scene. Far below you is the wreckage of a pink compact car, a few meters away a large semi-truck with just a few dents in its front end. While it is distant, you can see that the airbags had deployed in the car, and that the roll-cage is largely intact.

I wonder if I lived, you say, except you don't really. Without a mouth, without a body, you can't say anything. But yet you are.

I was wondering that, too, your Aunt's non-voice says nearby.

You look around and see her floating near you. Except it's not her. It's her essence. You would know it anywhere. The woman who picked you up at the airport. The woman who, as a young adolescent, had been the object of an unhealthy crush. The woman who had been so kind do you when your father died. You floated nearer to her.

Are we dead? You ask, not knowing which answer you would prefer. To be honest, you feel incredibly calm, as if all the stress, all the trauma of your life had slipped away. Now you were filtered down to your barest, purest being.

I'm not sure, came her reply, but I'm glad I'm not alone.

She floats over to you until your essences touch. You want to hug her, hold her, and while you don't have arms to wrap around her, you are still able to reach out, somehow, and enfold her. Your aunt reciprocates. Soon you find yourselves entangled with each other, tendrils of each essence entwined with the other, interwoven in a complicated mosaic of each other. It feels wonderful. Things make so much sense. You feel wisdom pouring into you from your aunt, deep into the dark hiding places of your soul. You suddenly understand so much more about life, what it important, what isn't. A brief sense of sadness hit your as you realize how this insight has probably come too late. That while your perspective might be changed, your life might very well be over.

Below you a firetruck and two ambulances have arrived. From the web that makes up the two of you, you can see workers scrambling, cutting the doors to the car open, your bodies being slowly pulled free from the wreckage.

"This one has a faint pulse!" shouts one of the paramedics.

"This one too!" calls another one.

The mount you to stretchers and quickly carry you to the backs of the ambulances, where you can briefly see them strap an oxygen mask to your face.

Everything changes.

Stress. Worry. Life.

It all begins to rush back.

No! you both cry in unison as you are violently ripped from each other, and plunge earthward into your bodies, where you regain consciousness briefly enough to feel excruciating pain. Then you slip away into the oblivion of pain-induced sleep.