Shadow World
Omne ignotum pro magnifico - Everything unknown seems wonderful.
Zero
It’s hard to pick the right words for something so amazingly beautiful. You want to be able to describe it perfectly, if not just so the reader can understand and imagine exactly what you’re seeing, and then at least so when you read back on the happening, you can re-experience it to its fullest delight. Maybe it’s impossible to redescribe the perfections of life. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, but even photographs don’t quite capture the original beauty. Not to mention the entire world of misunderstanding that’s waiting to emerge. Take, for example: “The marshmallow curves birthed into the fresh seawater, creating a feeling of pure serenity inside those who looked on.” It describes the moment well enough, but each mind will take a different picture to associate the rest of the chapter with. You’ll never know just how I saw the beauty in that day.
Likewise, it’s hard to write a book when you were never a very good writer, but even harder when you’re telling your story through someone else’s mind. You have the author, whose name is on the cover of this book; and you have me, and I’m finding it quite difficult to put my thoughts into words. Images are easy; though I’ve yet to perfect the art of transporting images through minds, this hostess seems to be receiving quite well.
Perhaps an introduction of sorts is in order: My name is Anna. I’ve come to you from a world beyond your own to tell a few pieces of my story. I won’t give an entire life biography; indeed, my life isn’t at all what I’ll be focusing on. This world, well, I like to call it the Shadow World, though I’m sure there’s a more proper name for it written in some book you’ll have to look up yourself when this is over. Some common names, though: “After-life,” “Heaven,” “Hell,” “Purgatory,” “Grave,” and oh, so many more. Currently I’m residing in the In-Between, where experienced dead-persons are able to communicate with the living. Now we’ll try our hand on a bit of the description I was picturing before.
It was that one morning on my drive to school I killed a bird, and then mutilated an already-deceased squirrel. I didn’t usually drive in such a manner, but it was that morning that I’d found out I had died. It’s not news one would take very lightly, or in fact news that anyone would normally believe at all. It was your typical movie-type discovery; I picked up the morning paper and read about a kid in a car crash, the best friend who blamed himself, and the parents who will forever mourn the loss of their only daughter. I saw the horrid picture of myself in twelfth grade, shoulder-length blue hair clashing with the school photographer’s blue-sky background, thick black-framed glasses and the bright and goofy, wide, metal-filled smile (I shudder to think, thank God the braces are gone). The article and terrible high school imagery were accompanied by a picture of Mat’s completely destroyed black Ford pick-up and a note about when the funeral was to be held for poor Anna Hithro who died only a day after her twenty-first birthday. I assumed it was a prank. I knew Mat’s car was totaled, though I didn’t remember being there for the occurrence. I was just too overjoyed he didn’t have an injury from it, that lucky bastard. It was March 22 somewhere along the East coast of the US and Mat was long overdue in getting me back for covering his brand new truck in caramel and glitter (that was one of my better ones). A newspaper article with my name in it hardly seemed to match so I was rather expectant of something to go terribly wrong with my car or to find a live chicken in my trunk.
I remember the odd feeling that overcame me as I set down the newspaper. It was as if the last few hours hadn’t even happened; I’d never picked up the newspaper and read any details about my death. The moment the parchment left my fingertips, everything was so completely confusing, but at the same time it all made sense. The meaning of my life came to me but as if it were written in an ancient language that no one understood and no one was trying to figure out. Sometimes when you wake up in the morning whether it be by alarm or natural causes, you forget what you were dreaming about. You know for certain that you were in fact dreaming, but for the life in you, you cannot recall any tiny bit of it. However, you’re still awake new with a feeling you associate with whatever events occurred in your slumber. It almost makes sense, like information on the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t figure it out.
I was the only person on the road that very dreary, rainy day. I wasn’t very surprised about it, though, since that was usually the case anyway. I was more interested in thinking about Mat and how he got the newspaper to look so real to realize how completely dead the outside world was. Spring had just started and normally the trees would seem to blossom with such life in the blink of an eye; such green and beautiful springs we always had. But the trees were black as if it were the dead of winter and someone put on an extra coat of the dark paint, just for effect. My eyes saw everything with a wind and fog effect, but the world wasn’t blurred. It was quiet, though quite unpeaceful, and I could swear it was raining — flooding, even, but while I was driving to school that somber March day, all I could think about was how lame Mat’s joke was.
I didn’t begin to be too suspicious about Matthew’s prank until I arrived at school and realized I’d never driven there. Somehow it made perfect sense that I was standing in the middle of campus suddenly, with no car and no memory of walking there. I was in such a state of confusion and dismay that only the minor details didn’t make sense, such as the complete ignorance of the general population that I was standing in front of the courtyard without my textbook for the next class. It seemed, only for a few moments, that it should have been of great concern that I wasn’t prepared. The four buildings behind me were much taller than they should have been, and certainly the incorrect color — Everything was a shade of grey. In front of me stood the giant oak tree that always seemed terribly out of place in front of a small, well-kept garden contained in a courtyard beside the student union building. We called it a courtyard, but it was just a red-bricked sitting area, complete with benches and picnic tables for resting pleasure. The garden, however, was no longer well-kept and weeds sprouted out of the ground the very moment I was standing there, completely oblivious.
When I was alive, I’d lean against the oak tree in between classes and read. I was always excited when spring arrived because it would transform into such a beautiful display of colors (with influence of the garden around it). It was the only thing of value to me while I wasted away in extended schooling. Something inside me knew the tree looked different that day, but that something wasn’t surfacing and spilling all, so I knelt beside the tree as was routine. It had grown and of course it was as dead as the rest of the world was. Its branches extended to the heavens and parallel oceans, or seemed to, and the lack of vibrant beauty wasn’t a concern to me. It all seemed somewhat empty. I didn’t have a book to read, and somehow that seemed perfectly normal. I wasn’t paying attention to the rest of the world, and all thoughts of Mat or anyone else I’d known exited my mind. I felt nothing, yet everything at once, as if my purpose had been fulfilled and I was beaming with such pride, though nothing had happened.
It was only as I started to wonder about the oak tree (after it seemed hours had passed) that I started to notice the shadows. I hadn’t seen them before, as my mind was so focused on what I did during daily life. I wasn’t sure what they meant and they quite frightened me. The people who were once around and ignoring me were gone, though they didn’t seem to be there for the few hours before I started wondering about the tree anyway. The shadows were shifty, kind of blurry. They were mostly black or dark gray, though here and there I’d notice a midnight blue or dark blood-red shadow. Some would blink in and out as a TV with a bad satellite connection would, and some were so transparent, I wondered how I knew they were there. They weren’t in any specified shape; not the outline of a human or other being nor any inanimate object I could ponder. They were simply black blobs floating over the ground, which I noticed shortly after my fixation with the shadows.
The ground couldn’t be seen. It looked as though there was always a two-foot flood that one had to walk through, but as water and wetness did not exist in this world, there was no change in shade on clothing or feeling on the skin. It wasn’t air; it wasn’t solid or liquid. It had me thinking of the image I associate with the word “plasma,” as it had the same glowy effect zoomed cells always had in the videos we watched during school, though it wasn’t really anything I’d describe as a “substance,” because although there was something there, there really wasn’t. It wasn’t transparent and it had this sort of thickness that made it hard to swallow when I felt it covering my feet. The shadows floated slightly above this nonwater area, and created shadows of their own on its surface. I wondered where I really was, because this certainly was not my school, and the shape that rested behind me was certainly not my tree. Confusion was always present, but the emptiness subsided to the horrible feeling of being lost without hope. I wondered if the shadows had eyes and wondered who I was or why I was in their world. I wondered why suddenly I felt very ill, why suddenly my skin felt rock hard, my eyeballs felt like they had caved in, why my head was pounding to the beat of an old song…
I felt like I was dying, if I knew what dying felt like. I screamed ten thousand times louder than I ever had, grabbed my head in pain and toppled to the ground into a vulnerable position. I felt every living-human emotion surge through me and leave my body. It was difficult to decipher each emotion from the other, though when you have every single emotion ever felt by a single person in one lifetime beating through every inch of your body all at once, the most prominent feeling that comes to mind is terrible, horrendous pain. There was a great amount of pressure on my body, the same way you feel when you’re awake at seven in the morning without two-day’s sleep and everything, even just a breath of air, seems like fourteen-ton weight on your person though multiplied by a large number of digits. If my head had imploded, gushing its contents into the universe around me, I would not be surprised, but I didn’t get the satisfaction until after weeks of torture when it all suddenly stopped. I didn’t feel empty — I didn’t feel anything at all. I didn’t know it then, but the endless pain was caused by my realizing I was dead and the sudden stop was the moment my subconscious became my conscious and reality became apparent. Every human emotion had left my body and the remainder of my living mind had dissipated. The last living person on Earth had finally accepted I was dead, and I was taken out of my misery. I had become a shadow like the rest of them.
Time passes differently in the shadow world. We don’t have “minutes” or “hours,” or even “days,” because there are no light or dark periods. It always looks the same here, at least until you learn how to control it. The sky is dark gray and cloudless, the trees and plants have no life in them, and the ground can’t be seen. Time does exist, but it’s not defined. There’s no way to define it because it moves so frequently compared to living time, but at any moment it can slow to a stop, or even go backwards while you’re going forwards. The shadow world itself, like the time, is undefined. It’s neither living nor dead, nor undead nor unliving. It’s not an in-between or a resting place; it doesn’t consist of only lost souls or those who don’t know their dead or those who chose to die. It simply is, and there’s no explanation for it. I couldn’t explain the transition of days quite properly. There was no light or dark, as I said, unless I made it so, but I never much made it dark. I’d just suddenly get the notion one gets when she wakes up in the morning and the day before feels like a dream.
This is the world I discovered myself in when the pain subsided and I didn’t feel empty or complete. I wasn’t confused anymore, as confusion is a living emotion, but I didn’t know what had happened or where I was. I didn’t feel lonely or regretful and I didn’t miss my emotions. It was as if I was born without them. If you’re born color-blind, you don’t miss colors because you’ve never seen them. It’s hard to accurately describe it, because you can’t use phrases like “it felt like,” because feelings were utterly nonexistent. It’s truly impossible to describe this world, it’s inhabitants and the way it is. It was as if everything was nothing and I was reborn into an entirely new state of being. I remembered my life, of course - You always do. But it’s remembered as if it was a movie I watched from the main character’s perspective, but I fell asleep and missed the ending. I didn’t remember much of the beginning, and you’d forget too if you were watching a movie for twenty-one years straight.
I didn’t know how I died until just recently. You only get to know if you purposefully offed yourself. I’d always suspected, though, that it was in a car wreck of sorts. I was always a cautious driver but Mat was never too careful when it came to road rage. Not that I blame him for my death — I most certainly don’t. It doesn’t much matter in the end. If someone dies by murder, it wouldn’t matter if they walked a different path that day. They would have died that very moment somehow — That’s how you get those “freak” deaths like soda machines falling on people and pianos rolling down flights of stairs. It doesn’t matter how you die because how you live has no effect on where you end up. You’re wondering it, I know, so I’ll spill the beans at the very beginning. You won’t accept it, but here goes: There is no creator. No “Heaven,” “Hell,” “After-Life,” so on. None of that. I wouldn’t doubt there are different shadow worlds around, and maybe they are completely unlike one another, but no one has to do, or believe, anything different to go to a certain place. Life is just an illusion, as is death. There is no “One Purpose” and no living individual has the same purpose as another. In the shadow world, there’s no hierarchy of beings, but we’re not all “equal” because that doesn’t matter. It’s not a concern. There’s no freedom or resistance, no strength or weakness. This world just is, as every world is, or should be. Some people go back to the living world, and some come here, some linger in between. The words “dark” and “gloomy” mean something to me, but they might mean something entirely different to someone else, maybe my equivalent of “bright” and “happy.” There is no dictionary in this world, so when there are interactions, “definitions” are based entirely on the individual’s interpretation.
It’s after that moment that I really died, when the human world was sucked out of me and I thought nothing of it that my story begins.
One
I was sitting at a bench and the sun was shining through the black branches onto the red brick, though no ground-shadows were created. I had learned the appearance of this world was tied with both acceptance and imagination. The shadows turned into people, all enjoying the weather, some still unliving and some undead. A group of men were standing in a circle, singing “Who Wrote the Book of Love?” and a shadow-person passed by, saying, “They’re singing music from the old days!” They sang a rotation of songs I knew as “oldies,” and it seemed like I should have been at a 50’s nostalgia restaurant, watching a group of five men wearing white suits sing a-capella for entertainment. I didn’t know the lyrics, but I enjoyed the performance nonetheless. I wondered if I’d created them, or maybe the shadow world for them was a 50’s nostalgia restaurant and they were just playing their part in their world. I wondered what I looked like to them. My world was a bright, windy day outside the center building of a college campus. The ground was paved with bright red brick and the trees slowly became more vibrant with colors, though they were still leafless. Shadow people formed into human shapes claimed benches and picnic tables, some even sat on the ground to watch the singers. They weren’t anything too exceptional, just college boys rehearsing for a performance, but they were quite pleasing to the ear and perfectly in tune with one another.
This is how the time usually passed. Of course I didn’t attend any classes, but my after-life (as I’ll call it for your understanding) consisted mainly of what I did in my during-life in between classes. I read the first ten chapters of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein repeatedly, as that was all I had read of it before I’d died. Though I’d seen all the old horror movies, I’d have loved to know how that book continued. I also usually wrote small snippets of ideas, thoughts mostly, like a small unkempt diary, though I always seemed to find my pages missing at one point or another. The university was always full of bustling people. Over however much time I spent stuck in between classes, I never built up the nerve to talk to anyone, just as in my during-life. Every “day” (as I’ll say for your understanding) wasn’t the same, mind you, but I saw all the same people, including the singers (though they weren’t always singing — this was certainly a treat!).
It was this one interesting day that perked my interest. The sun was out, high in the sky, and the wind was rushing to its destination with sudden determination that I’d noticed the old oak tree had begun to grow leaves. This quite frightened me as I had been dead so long that I’d forgotten about seasons and colors like green and purple and blue. Everything was mostly dark red, brown, grey or black in color, including the people around me. It was like a television set with bad coloring, a faded postcard or an old photograph. The colored leaves only grew on the oak tree and left the other trees bare and invisible as usual, and it was a bit of an event to those sitting around it. I wondered if it meant something significant, like the living world had ended or world peace had been accomplished, or perhaps another greatly talented musician had died. The day seemed to continue ordinary as usual, despite the gradual growth of the green, purple and blue leaves. It was one of those days when you have the concert of your favorite band to attend, if you could just get through school, but school seemed to just go on and the clock hasn’t stopped, but it hasn’t moved either. There wasn’t anything in particular I was waiting for but I desperately wanted class to start.
I blinked, and when I opened my eyes everything was the same, yet somehow it felt very different. The tree was still alive, now fully grown and as beautiful as life and death in the same room at the same moment. It was also now being ignored by the passer-bys.
