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I COULDN'T REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE THE PAIN. There was screaming, crying, and at one point I swear I heard someone throwing up. Everything burned like I was being set on fire and my arm felt like it was melting off.
I couldn't see what was happening because my eyes watered with terror. The pain wasn't particularly localized, it was everywhere around my body. Between the shouting that I didn't recognize as any language I understood I heard sobs from someone beside me, someone I didn't have the strength to see.
The few things that I could remember when the pain stopped was that I was supposed to stay in the room and that I had. I had been in my room when this happened. Things burned while I was sitting on my bed. My eyes stopped watering once I realized this, the tears still sticky against my cheeks.
Just as everything stopped burning, they turned cold. The type of cold that doesn't give you chills, but makes you loopy. My hands shook with adrenaline as I began to regain my eyesight. Colorful blobs formed where clear images once existed in my mind. I reached out for things that I knew were there but couldn't find. My ears rang when the cold came, a sharp tingling flowing through my freezing body.
This is what it felt like to die.
And as I died I wondered if I would see before I went, if my eyes would allow me that much. Or if my last memory would be what I could figure out from my long-term memory of the layout of this room. If the feeling of my bed would go last and if my hearing would come back. No, it wouldn't, I decided, my body was too cold for that. Since my body was cold, I would never hear again.
In my mind I couldn't remember. I was in my room, I was supposed to be here, but in the shock I was left wondering why this was happening. My body's pumping of adrenaline acted like a memory wiper. I was left with fear and terror that couldn't quite sink in. Everything spilled out of me like I were a popped balloon.
If I was screaming before, which I couldn't figure out if I had been, I was now. The vibrations from my screams filled the air, sprang off the walls, and left me terrified. I'd never screamed like this before. I felt like an animal cornered, an animal in their natural habitat taken out by a poacher who wasn't supposed to be there.
Why was I dying? What had done it? Why did it burn and why was I becoming so cold. Why were my eyes starting to show color so vivid that I couldn't breathe when experiencing it? I felt dry, so dry, from my throat to my head and my wrist.
Do these things happen to everyone when they die? Or is it just me?
My eyes finally focused enough to see the hallway. I wasn't in the room. The colors were dulling. My ears still rang like off beat church bells, but the color was becoming more like what I remembered it was.
Had someone taken me to the hallway? Was I going to die here?
I felt a snapping feeling within my chest, then in my throat and lungs. Things were getting longer and then shorter again. I whimpered and began screaming again. As the snaps got louder and closer to my feet, the ringing in my ears got quieter and quieter, before suddenly stopping.
