Another life

As I fell into a deep sleep, the first thing that surrounded me was complete darkness. In fact, it was so dark that I’d have worried to have died again if I had been able to think at that moment. My brain had shut down completely and now tried to recover my body from the exhaustion of everything that had happened. I had woken up in my old bed in the saloon, fought a duel, died, swam through what had felt like an entire ocean and then finally found a piece of land of questionable population.

After my brain had left this complete shutdown-mode, I started to have different dreams. None really long but rather short excerpts of things that I myself had never seen. My colleagues returning to office the next day, joking about me pulling an all-nighter before realizing I would never do anything ever again. Finding a dead body in an office building is not the best way to start the day. The police was called, my former boss seemed more upset about having to send his employees home for the day and deal with the police trying to make sure my death had a natural cause. My boss seemed to think of my death less like a situation that deserved pity, but more like an obstacle that cost him a lot of money. Gets him right. During all of this I stood in a corner of the room and had a look at the people around me.

Nobody pitied my fate. Some looked relieved as they got sent home, others even worried because this might as well be a day they won’t receive a wage for. Only one coworker actually looked worried. Murasaki hadn’t been anything I would call more than a short acquaintance, but taking an outside look at my dead body, I could tell, that he would be the next to share my fate, if he didn’t change something immediately. I looked into his eyes while he looked through me and I could see that he was thinking exactly the same. Maybe my death had at least saved him.

The city outside the window looked exactly like the day before my passing, but the person that was mirrored in the glass looked completely different. Was that really me? My face had turned into a slightly rounder shape. My cheekbones weren’t as visible as they were on the body sitting in front of the desk across the room. My skin was tanned from the sun, and my strength had increased as well. I wasn’t particularly muscular, but only now I realized how close to the definition of “skin and bones” I had been.

I needed to check this after I woke up, I had decided.

Then the scenery around me changed and I saw how I was thrown off that machine where my second life had ended.

Did I actually leave a body behind every time I died?

The next change of scene. As I expected by now, I found myself back in the basement of the mansion. Here it seemed like there had passed a little more time since my death had occurred. My body had already completely dried out and I was glad that I wasn’t able to smell what the room smelled like. The door to the room was open and the light from the hallway spilled inside.

“Well, here you are! I had hoped that I would find you well!”, said a voice I had hoped to be able to forget during my lifetime.

I turned around and once more faced Miwako.

“So much surprised to meet me in my own house?”, I looked around indecisively.

Was she able to see me? This was a dream, wasn’t it? Then again, why shouldn’t she be able to see me if this was a dream.

I pointed at myself to check if she was talking to me or to my mummified body on the other side of the room.

“Of course I’m talking to you. Bodies rarely respond, you know?”

“O-obviously.”, I tried to play it cool, with little success.

“Look at the mess you made. Just doing something horrible like this in someone else’s house.”, she feigned pity.

“Extraordinary circumstances….”, I explained.

“Didn’t I take good care of you? You could have had it so nice with me. But you refused my kindness.”

I didn’t respond. I could tell her about the reasons why I had tried to escape in the first place, but then again there was no way to tell how she would react to the truth.

“Nothing? Not even a tiny excuse?”

“Isn’t this enough of an answer?”, I asked, pointing on my own body.

“Well, if that’s what you want to tell me, go away. Farewell.”

With a flick of her hand, I was catapulted against the next wall. I passed through it without any resistance and then was surrounded by sunlight and people.

In front of me, again, I saw my own dead body. This time already the round, tanned version of it, that I had seen mirrored int the office’s window.

The crowd surrounding my body had taken their hats off. Bent over my body, there was Casey kneeling next to me.

“You idiot!”, she screamed while slamming her fists onto my chest. But what seemed like anger at first, actually wasn’t.

Tears flew down her cheeks and dropped onto me. As she stopped punching me, she completely collapsed onto me, not having the strength or the willingness to keep her composure.

“So that is what the voice meant.”, I quietly said to myself.

After having thought about how it would be if I met someone who actually cared for me, I did not just not even realize it, I threw it away. For what? A greater good? I never was so heroic as to risk anything for something abstract like this. If I was honest to myself, I maybe even thought that she might have taken a liking to me, but didn’t dare to think about this more deeply, because I was too sure, that this was nothing more than wishful thinking. I had been too sure, and that for too long a time, that nobody would ever think of me as a dear person, not even as a friend.

“I’m sorry.”, I said placing my hand over her shoulder. I wasn’t sure if this was a dream or not, but if my hand passed through her shoulder without even giving the impression of touching it, the feeling would have been unbearable.

“If only I had realized it earlier.”, I spoke another excuse, trying not to feel sadness myself. Sadness about my own death would have felt like self-pity. Maybe it was. But right now, I wished that I had never left her back in this world.

Archie fought his way through the crowd and took a moment to fully take in the moment unfolding before him, before gently trying to pull her away from me.

At first, she resisted, but then she didn’t even have enough forces for this.

During all of this, I turned away. I passed through the crowd without looking back once more, for it was more than I could handle.

“I got it! Stop showing me this!”, I begged, thinking that this was the work of the two voices, but nobody replied, and the dream continued for an awful while.

When I finally woke up, my face was covered with sweat and tears, my throat was aching, and I couldn’t stop the tears from flowing.

“What have I done?”

I felt awful. Awful for what I had done to Casey, to myself and also because I felt like I didn’t deserve to feel so about anything I had done.

The tears kept flowing but when I tried to wipe them off my face, my hand stopped shortly after.

My hands and feet were tied to the bed I was laying on.

“You’ve been through quite a lot, haven’t you?”, asked an old woman who approached my bed.

I could have asked a lot of questions or tried to fight my way out of this bed, but I laid my head to rest once more and silently nodded.

“You can’t even imagine.”