My Reflection

Death is cold. Very cold. And then, it’s not. I squeeze my eyes as I sense a bright light above me. It’s like directly facing the sun, seeing the light through your eyelids. Not a great feeling coming from complete darkness. After a good thirty seconds, I’m finally able to squint my eyes open to see a figure above me.

“Hello, and congratulations! You have died!”

The voice was so cheerful that, for a moment, I thought I had heard him wrong.

“I mean, dying isn’t usually something to celebrate,” he continued, “but it’s not necessarily a bad thing either! Especially when you get to come here.”

He sounded like a man, though I couldn’t be completely sure. My eyes were still adjusting to the light, and I didn’t want to offend whoever was standing over me. I had only been dead for about thirty seconds. It seemed a little early to make enemies.

My stomach dropped. Dead. He had said I was dead. I was dead. The thought sat in my mind, impossibly simple and impossibly wrong. I stared up at him, waiting for the panic to come, but all I could feel was a strange emptiness in my chest.

I was dead. Seventeen years old, and I was dead.

“Where am I?” I mumble sitting up. Whatever I was lying on felt like one of those cots you lie down on at a nurse’s office. It was strangely comfortable, and the sheets were perfectly clean. Almost too perfect. There wasn’t a single wrinkle in them.

“Not in Heaven that’s for sure! Don’t worry, you’re not in Hell either. You’re in a magical place! A special place! A place everyone wants to be!” he starts.

As my eyes adjusted, I could finally make him out. He was a short, round, completely bald man with an enormous smile on his face. He looked more like someone who worked at a children’s theme park than someone who greeted the dead.

“Home?” I ask. He laughs, genuinely amused by the question. The sound is almost comforting, which somehow makes it worse. So obviously I’m not.

“Alright, enough with the games. Let’s get to the point,” he says. Thank goodness. “You’re Irene Cloft, right?” he asks, looking down at a sheet of paper on his clipboard. I nod my head and he continues. “Well, from what it shows, you died from drowning in a lake and therefore arrived at this wonderful place called the Center Foil.”

Drowning. The word makes my stomach twist. I look down at myself, suddenly wondering if I’m supposed to be wet. My clothes are completely dry. I don’t even feel cold anymore.

“But don’t worry! Things here are simple,” he continues. “You made some choices in your life, and...” He gestures toward me. “Obviously, some of them weren’t the best choices. After all, you’re here at seventeen, so...” He trails off, giving me an awkward little smile.

“Okay, I get it. I was an idiot.”

“But you don’t have to stay one! When you’re here, you’re going to look back. On everything! Every choice you’ve ever made, and see what would’ve happened if you’d chosen differently. What would have happened if you’d taken the other path.”

I stare at him for a moment. A part of me still can’t believe I’m actually here, wherever here is. I’m dead, and somehow I’m standing in a room listening to a strange man explain that I get to look back at my life.

“Really?” I ask. The word comes out before I can think about it.

“Yeah!”

“How?”

“Simple,” he answers. He then hands me a book. “Inside this book are all of your life’s decisions. My job is to hand this to you. Your job is to see all of your missed possibilities. It starts with the decision that would have the biggest impact on your life.”

He places the book in my hands, and before I can ask another question, he’s gone. I stare at the empty space where he was standing. No goodbye. No explanation. Just gone.

I look down at the book in my hands. Like I said, death is cold.

I examine the book I’d been given.

The book had a mirror covering the entire front cover. It was smooth from top to bottom, perfect in every inch. I ran my fingers over it, but there wasn’t a single smudge left behind.

I opened the book. There was only a small paragraph on the first page. I flipped through the rest, but every page was empty. My eyebrows furrowed as I wondered how this was supposed to reflect my entire life. I turned back to the small paragraph, hoping it held an answer to all my questions.

Irene sat on the steps in front of the school, waiting for her head to stop buzzing before she walked home.

The walls, floor, and roof of the room faded away as my high school appeared around me. I was standing in front of myself, sitting on the steps just as the book described. It was strange seeing myself like this. I looked exactly the way I remembered, but somehow I felt like I was looking at a stranger.

My past self was clutching her head after being hit by a soccer ball while crossing the field. The guy who kicked it had missed the goal by a long shot, but somehow managed to hit my head perfectly.

As soon as she was ready to leave, a boy walked up to her holding some ice. The same boy who kicked the ball at her head.

I looked up to see exactly what the book had described happening in front of me. The brunette boy sat down next to my younger self and handed her the ice.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine,” my younger self sighs, taking the ice and pressing it to her head.

“Sorry about that, by the way. I guess my aim was a bit off.”

“A lot off,” she laughs.

I smile as the memory comes back to me. Of course I remember this day vividly.

“I’m Leo,” he introduces himself. “Brut.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Leo Brut,” I say, shaking his extended hand. “I’m Irene.”

I watch the two of them talk for a while before I notice words beginning to appear beneath the last sentence in the book.

He then asked to walk her home.

“Where are you going?” he asked, as if on cue.

“Oh, I was just going to go home.”

“Oh. Mind if I walk you? To make sure no other soccer balls hit you on your way there?” he chuckled.

Should he walk you home? Underline your answer.

YES NO

I look back up at the two of them, frozen in place along with everything around me. They’re all waiting for my answer. I know this moment. I know exactly what I chose, and I know what came after it. The memory of this day plays in my head alongside the answer I gave. The answer that supposedly changed the course of my life.

YES NO

“Okay,” I chuckled, standing up. He grabbed my things as he stood up too.

The pair walked past me toward my house, laughing about whatever topics their conversation happened to drift toward. I watched them disappear, then looked down at the book in my hands and the choice I’d made.

The world around me began to fade. The walls, floor, and roof of the room slowly returned, and suddenly I was standing in a completely different place. It looked like a bedroom. I looked around, surprised at how quickly everything had changed.

Your story will continue tomorrow.

I guess I get one choice a day. Somehow, that only makes me think harder about the choices I’ve made. I wonder what would have happened if I’d chosen no. It’s the same thought I had when I chose yes a year ago. You’d think I’d have changed my mind after learning that this was the decision that had the biggest impact on my life, even though it makes no sense. But I guess I still have more to learn.

Or maybe I made the right decision. Who knows?

I close the book and stare at myself in its cover. I notice that the mirror never smudges. It’s practically perfect from top to bottom, every inch of it. Well, apart from the small crack in the top right corner.

Was that always there?

Another question I don’t have an answer to.

I set the book down on the table in front of me and walk over to the bed in the middle of the room. I need a nap already. Hopefully, tomorrow things will make more sense.