The Man

I met the strangest man today. He was dressed in a white lab coat, and he had a face like that falling sensation that jolts you awake when you're trying to fall asleep.

I was sitting in my dark basement, spending my fifth hour slumped in my broken armchair, watching TikToks that I can't remember. It was also the fifth hour since my girlfriend dumped me.

I sit in that armchair when I'm scared. 

The man came then; the room seemed to produce him out of the pure fabric of my memory, like he'd always been there, my mind just smoothed over him until now.

He was remarkably polite and reserved; he just stood still and looked at nothing with his jolt-you-awake face. This was what he said.

"Mr. Coal, I am a doctor at the Burlington Lab for Neuroscientific-Mortology. Three years from this memory, it will be proven that in the seven minutes after death, the human brain experiences its entire lifespan in full vivid detail. 

Four years from this memory, we will discover a way to interact with and manipulate the brain's depiction of this lifespan. 

Five years from this memory, you will decide and inform your doctor that, upon death, you want to be told that you are re-living your own life in your head. It's a choice everyone can make after the discovery.

Six years from this memory, you will be caught in a fatal car wreck, and my team and I will get this message to you."

"I'm dead?" I said.

"Yes."

"Can I change it?" I asked.

"No. It will all play out just like it already has."

Then I blinked, and the man was gone, and I no longer felt like jolting awake. I kept sitting there, in the basement, letting what he said roll around in my head. I knew, but I couldn't do anything about it.

I knew,

But I couldn't do anything about it. 

So I didn't. I went upstairs and opened a window. The light poured into me, heavy like a weighted blanket. It poured and pooled and filled me up so that I was a being made not out of fear, not out of rejected body, but out of brain and light.

Then I went on with my day.