• Never in my life had I felt more at peace. Never in my life had I felt so in touch with the world, with life and humanity in general.

    When I held the gun to my face. When the barrel touched my forehead. When I wrapped my curled, bandaged finger around the trigger. When I pressed and pulled it. When the bullet broke through my flesh and muscle and cartilage and bone. When it reached my brain, and went through it, leaving a hole in its place where it had been. I could feel no pain, no misery, nothing anymore. My eyesight blurred, things span rapidly out of control. Things shifted from all colors to just blue. Mushroom blue.

    Everything went blank. I heard nothing. I laid very still, even more still than when I had found the love of my life had died. I remember the day clearly, as clear as an unmuddied lake. I was sitting near my phone, as I usually had been for the three weeks before, to see if the doctors had any news as to whether or not she was okay. The phone rang, and I picked it up. “Your wife has died.” They said. “She stopped breathing earlier.” Those words rang through my head ten thousand times, giving me a headache so intense that I could not move. I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know how to act. I stood there, silent, like an old book in a library no one ever read. Long story short, things got bad and I had decided that suicide was the only way out of this pain. I was lonely and miserable, and the was no other alternative.

    …I heard wind. I opened my eyes to a bold, blue sky, with few clouds, and many, many stars, shining through them. I felt as though I were laying in sand. I turned my head to see that I was. I sat up and looked around. To the right of me, there was an open, flowery meadow, leading into a forest, then mountains. To the left of me, was a beach, the ocean, and a house near there. It was the house that I had lived in. I stared at the house intensely, until out of the corner of my eye, I saw a small, female figure sitting on the beach, facing the waves.

    I stood up and walked toward the figure, so I could ask if I was really dead or not. As I got closer and closer to the figure, it started to look more familiar. I stopped when I finally saw who it was.

    “…r-Red?” I said, hesitating.

    The figure turned and looked at me, only to widen her eyes at the sight of me. She looked frightened, as if I were a stranger with a knife, ready to stab someone in the neck.

    “Red, it’s me…” I said, as I approached her and knelt down in front of her.

    She had blood-red hair with black at the tips, diamond-blue eyes, and a large scar over her eye. She flinched and scooted away from me, obviously afraid. “I-I don’t know who you are…”

    “Red, honey, it’s me… Trent… your husband, remember?” I had her wedding ring on a chain around my neck. I showed it to her, hoping she would remember the red ruby and how it used to sparkle.

    She stared at the ruby, then into my eyes. “...t-Trent…??”

    “Yes, Red…” I said. “Trent, remember…? …we lived together…”

    She looked down rather blankly. “Oh yes… I do remember….”

    “Yes… we were married…”

    Her eyes began to tear up as she was looking down. Then she started trembling, but she never made a sound. Something was wrong.

    “Red… what’s wrong…?” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder. She glanced up at me, then scooted away, frightened. “Red, what’s the matter? What happened?”

    “Go away, go away…” She said. “I don’t want you here… you won’t want to be here…”

    “Why?” I said.

    “Because I don’t love you anymore… I don’t feel anything towards you anymore… I’m sorry, but you have to leave this place…” She replied, tears streaming down her face.

    “But I love you, I want to stay with you, forever…” I said, about to cry myself. “I’ll always love you, even if you don’t love me…”

    “…no… no… no, no, no, no, no!!!” She screamed, clawing at her scalp. “I can’t live with you being here, don’t you understand??”

    “Why not???”

    “Because you committed suicide! I wanted you to live, Trent!! I want you to be happy and do what you wanted to do…”

    “But… But I... I wanted to be with you…”

    “…I thought you were stronger than that, Trent…”

    I stood up and simply walked away. I wasn’t going to take this. I left her to sit and cry and stew. If she didn’t love me anymore, then I didn’t want to make her unhappy by staying. More than anything, I wanted her to be happy. I was hurt that she didn’t love me. But that wasn’t as important to me as making sure she was happy.

    So I walked. I walked and I walked until I grew tired and fell down. I cried. I slept.

    Never in my life had I felt more useless.