It's Somewhere Beneath Us

If the Sun Comes Up

Darkness. A pitch-black void engulfed every sense, like sleep. We sleep every night, yet we never honestly know what the process feels like. We experience the before and the after but never the in-between. One second our eyes are closed, the next, they're open, and it's a different time of day. Sometimes a dream fills the empty space, but sometimes it doesn't. On those nights, it's just darkness. I learned what that in-between space felt like as the last breath of air slipped past my lips, and I gave up my life. It was all I felt.

But then it suddenly wasn't. I was still in blackness, but now I could feel something. An aura around me, a sense of self. I wasn't nowhere; I was somewhere. I no longer had the sensation of a body, but I focused the tangled string of thoughts that made up my drifting consciousness to remember what it felt like. To have form. To feel. My hands tensed at my sides to grab ahold of something silky and soft, a stark contrast to the cold car roof I had just died on. I felt it not just in my hands but my back too; I was still laying down.

The simple realization caused my consciousness to rush into one point so violently that I jolted straight up with a gasp, my functions returning to me. I had no idea what I expected to first see in the afterlife, but a familiar soft yellow was not it.

The room I was in was undoubtedly the yellow room, but it couldn't have possibly been the same house. It was clean, with no water stains or dust in sight. As I inhaled, for the first time in four years, I smelled no trace of mildew. The room around me was decorated, with pictures adorning the old yellow walls and dressers furnishing the corners. Real, living house plants sat perched on shelves, and below me, a warm, cozy, not damp bed held my newly realized form. My clothes were no longer torn, stained, and tattered, and I had no more bandages covering wounds on my skin. My fingers instinctively wandered up to trace the spot on my chest where I had seen an axe head disappear moments ago. There wasn't even a mark.

I looked behind me out of the clean, clear window to see that it was night outside, unobscured by an endless blanket of clouds that once was. The disturbingly perfect round hills that I was used to seeing had been smoothed out into natural rolling plains of golden wheat that swayed gently beneath an early breeze. Mountains even further hid a crowing golden sky as the sun began to rise somewhere behind them. The sight beckoned me forward with a warmth in my chest unlike anything I had ever seen, and I wanted nothing more than to answer it. I stood.

As I went for the door to the kitchen, I stopped, turning around out of morbid curiosity. The entrance to the basement stood waiting for me. The door where the thing from downstairs lived. The door that contained the true horrors of the house. Slowly I stepped toward it and turned the handle. Only a closet full of spare blankets and pillows greeted me.

As I stepped into the kitchen, I found that it too was decorated like the yellow room. The whole house was. Warm colors and pleasant decorations blanketed the area, and though I had spent so many miserable years in the layout of these same rooms, in that moment, all I could feel was comfort. Security. It wasn't the same place I had come from; it had to be somewhere far, far apart.

As I passed the elegant dining room down the hall to the bedroom, I spotted something through the living room doorway. A figure sitting on a bench in the sunroom, gazing off into the horizon. I felt no fear as I called out.

"Hello?"

The figure turned their head slightly, and I suddenly felt numb as they spoke, "Oh, hey. You're finally awake."

I forced one foot slowly in front of the other as I stepped closer. The feeling of shocked joy made it hard to speak again, "E-Ethan?"

I heard him laugh softly before calling out, "Yeah, man. It's me. You want to come talk for a bit?"