Could death awaken us to the hidden realm of spirits?

Is true immortality truly awakened through death?

A blinding light washes over you, and then you are rising towards the sun and the moon. Or are you falling, my dear reader, towards a mashing ring of nothingness?

The dirt falls on the lid of your coffin, and you begin to dig. You dig yourself to brimstone and teeth.

Death is romanticism. Romanticism is illusion. What may death bring to us? What may our mentality decide.

Upon reflection, is it better to drive oneself towards the romantic? Or is it better to wait for the great mystery to swallow us whole, with no choice in the matter?

Peter jumped.

In a moment and in an eternity, Peter fell towards the gravel of the street below. Time seemed to lose its hold over him; it seemed to both speed and drag. He saw time for the illusion that it was, and recalled almost passively the theory of general relativity.

Wind buffeted him violently. His skin seemed loose, his clothes felt unreal, his mind drifted through several layers of reality and impossibility.

Real became nothing. Nothing became real.

His body hit the city street. His skull was crushed, which killed him instantly. His body lost its solidity and turned to complete mush.

Investigator Richard Halbrook took a long drag from his cigarette and let the smoke seep softly from his lungs.

“You see a lot of these?” Doctor Rayes asked him.

Investigator Halbrook had held his position in the streets going on six years now.

“Yeah,” he told the older doctor,” I see a lot of these. People that just can’t take it anymore. They don’t know where to go for help: no next of kin, no friends.”

The psychiatrist nodded wisely.

“I’ve had three of my patients commit suicide. Once they get to a point, there’s no helping them.”

“What was his ailment?”

“He believed that he was cut off from society by a “technology sickness.” He said that technology, which connects most of the world, actually disconnected him from humanity.”

Richard Halbrook looked across the street at a crowd of people eagerly snapping pictures of the suicide with their cell phones. He was sure that those pictures would travel a great distance before the night was over.

“Hey,” Richard said, “I feel like that all of the time.”

Doctor Mitchell Rayes nodded. “Do you know what happened?” he asked.

Halbrook looked up to the top story, to the window from which a person had jumped just earlier that night, and took in a breath. He knew what happened.

“Peter Nicola smashed out the window with a chair and set his carpet on fire with a candle. He waited almost to the last moment to jump. He looked out the window and probably debated doing it. He had glass from the window embedded in his chest. After he was on the ground, that woman over there, Helen Haverty, ran over the corpse with her new Mercury.”

“He didn’t catch fire?”

“No, but it was close enough to singe his clothing.”

“Are you going to be okay, Investigator?”

“I’m not gonna need a shrink, if that’s what you mean.”

Doctor Mitchel Rayes laughed.

“Are you gonna be okay, Doc?”

“Hey, I can deal with it.”

Richard Halbrook took one last drag from his cigarette and crushed it under his shoe.

“I wonder about the afterlife,” he confessed to the doctor.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Mitchel Rayes told the investigator. “That’s what killed Peter: The romanticism of death.”