CHAPTER ONE
I die
I don’t really remember just when it happened, when I died. I know it wasn’t a long time ago, but it wasn’t recently either. I just knew after awhile that, although I felt pretty much as I always had, better actually, things were subtly different.
I mean, it’s not as if I really thought about life being a little odd; I mean we all kind of go about our lives as if on some sort of automatic pilot until something really important and different happens to us. And really, most lives just don’t have that much really different that comes up, at least nothing out of the ordinary. My extraordinary moment came about when I saw my old friend, my best friend really, Peter Hughes.
“Hi Pete,” I said happily. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen him, but when we were really young I remember seeing and playing with him almost every day of my life. He had the same red hair and freckles that I remembered, and the same gap-toothed smile. He smiled back at me, and waved. That’s when I remembered that he was dead.
This was my “wake up moment” if you will. Up to then, I’d just been coasting right along, enjoying what I thought of as my life, in good health and wellness, happy to be alive, but really just taking it for granted. I was only 35, right? Almost everyone feels immortal at that age, since for God’s sake, your life is probably at most only one-half over. I knew who I was, what I liked and did not, who my friends were, what I’d make for supper- everything about my life!
I finished my conversation with Pete as if nothing was amiss, and finally he looked down at his watch and said he had to go, his brother Larry and him were having supper with their parents, and he had to go. “I’ll see ya real soon, Wade,” he said. He always had kind of a raspy voice, ever since we were little kids together on Harnew Road West. “Call me, huh?” he said as he walked away. “It’s been a while!” And he got on his bike, and rode away down the sidewalk.
Once again, I don’t really know why this moment shocked me into a sort of wakefulness, but it did. I started thinking about what I always thought of as my totally ordinary life:
I worked as a writer, and had ever since I could remember. I wrote novels, and books on exercise and nutrition, which were sold online as ebooks, and published into paperbacks. I have many, many friends, acquaintances and neighbors, a little church I love going to, lots of pets- I’d say my life is full indeed! Nothing to complain about, or unusual there.
Maybe I’d been working too hard- sometimes when I was writing, I would forget to eat, and just get so caught up in the discovery of the story of my characters that I’d just go on and on, in a fever of inspiration. It really is true that a fictional universe can seem just as compelling and real as the one all about us, I mean anyone who has been caught up in a really good book or movie has experienced that.
Perhaps my characters had become so real to me that I had not been paying full attention to my regular work-a-day life. But that still did not explain why I had suddenly thought that my good friend, whom I was talking to, was a dead person.
