All things must come to an end, and the price of rebirth must be paid in blood.
If not, then may the gods have mercy on your soul.. -Unknown, XXXX
To anyone who reads this, know that I am not perfect. I am not a role model. You should not strive to be like me. I am not what others expect me to be.
I'm just a boy with not enough time on his hands, and less in his heart.
If all of my attempts have failed so far to dissuade you from learning about me, if you're one of those people who want to learn from others mistakes, so that they will not repeat in the future. Or you're simply a curious one who wishes to know my story, I won't judge you.
Hell, I'm the last person in the entire universe who should do that. Nobody should ever have to go through what I went through.
Nobody remembers their death...
So why do I?
Chapter 1: A new beginning
I never thought I'd grow up for a second time. I don't even really think that I deserve another chance. Especially not where I live now. I would have thought that I'd go to heaven, and if I was not allowed to enter its gates, then I thought that maybe for the rest of my eternal life, I would wander the earth as a formless phantom for however long the earth existed, scaring numerous unsuspecting people into running away from their homes with their tails between their legs. At least, I hoped that one of the two might happen. There's actually a third thing that could've happened but I really don't want to think about that one. I already dislike summer, I don't need to be reminded of it for the rest of my eternal life.
Anyways, what DID happen was far different than what I could ever imagine.
When I finally made it to the end of the road of life, I was greeted by a rather abrupt change in my scenery. What had originally been a hospital room with my loved ones surrounding me, crying over my failing fallen body, had turned into quite literally the opposite of existence.
There was nothing at all, not a damn thing in sight.
All that I could see was a sheer vastness of nothing. There was no light, darkness seeped in from everywhere in my vision. Even if there was light, I doubt that I could have even saw my own body, because there's nothing there to be seen. I'm just a lost soul, with nothing to call my own, no path for me to follow. I guess fate played me a cruel hand in the end. Thanks fate, you're really looking out for me.
I wondered if I'd ever get to leave this vacuum of nothingness, or if I was doomed to forever stay alone in the darkness. I wondered if both heaven and hell decided that I belonged in neither, and forced me to stay here, in this purgatory, this prison of unending darkness.
My answers, however, would soon be answered. Just not the way I expected them to be. I could feel something, out there in the darkness. What was it exactly, I couldn't know for certain but it felt strangely familiar.
Could that have been a heartbeat that I just felt?
At first the feeling of a rhythmic pulse sounded far away, as if I was separated from it almost entirely. As if it was on the other side of the world. But then it became louder and louder, steadily moving closer towards my shapeless being. The feeling became really peculiar when it felt like it was emanating from me, like it became a part of me.
Was this my own heartbeat?
At this point, I had almost without a shadow of a doubt that this was indeed my own heartbeat, but what exactly did that mean? Was I still alive in the real world? Can I even come back to it, and live with my friends and family members once more?
My answers would have to wait, unfortunately, for something even stranger happened. Unlike the beating of what I thought was my own heart, something else was beating. But it wasn't occurring in a familiar pattern that I've known for my entire life. No, this was a periodical in and out kind of beating. The kind that would normally be associated with labor, like mining rocks, or digging up dirt with a shovel. Someone was pounding something, I couldn't tell what exactly.
Who was doing this? Why can I hear them if I can't even see what they're doing?
My heart began to race as the sounds of this weird beating became more ferocious, like it had turned into someone trying to escape from something. From what, I had no clue. After what felt like a millennium, it began to slowly stop, and then I heard a really perplexing sound.
Was that the sound of an egg cracking?
No seriously, what in the hell was that sound?! When I was on my death bed, did someone randomly decide to crack open an egg and try to make an omelet, in the hopes of possibly waking me up? I had no objections to that, if I was coming back from the dead, I'd probably be starving; I like eggs anyway. It just seemed to me that something was just not right here. In addition to this bizarre sound, my surroundings became a blinding white. I had no hope of seeing anything in front of me, exactly the same as before but at least light was normally associated with good, and I for one like good things.
I was then assaulted by a barrage of different sounds, all thankfully muffled by what I initially assumed was my awakening back from the dead, but still audible enough to make me a little uneasy.
I heard voices in the haze of white light, one sounded deep and masculine, and the other two sounded soft and feminine. Their voices became more and more clearer as the light slowly began to fade. Instead of seeing the bodies that belonged to these new voices, The familiar darkness surrounded me once more, apparently unhappy with my sudden leaving earlier, and tried its best to wrestle me once more to the depths of the unknown. Something was off here, There's three unintelligible voices in the darkness, not six. I should know since… I died right in front of them.
It was at that moment when I came to a startling realization. Something that I have been wondering for awhile, but with the new pieces of evidence that I have gathered, what with the sounds of something pounding with an erratic and unpredictable pattern, and three beings around me, only one thing was definitely for certain. No question about it.
I didn't wake up. In addition to my pile of evidence, my gut feeling told me something that I hesitantly had to agree with, for there was no other explanation for what happened to me.
I think I've just been born.
It seemed so unlikely, so impossibly ridiculous! This stuff only happens in really bad stories I've read on the internet. How could I be born again if I had just died? Did I just restart my life, starting at the very beginning, or did I birth as someone else entirely? I have heard of a few theories of rebirth, some people thought that life itself was like an endless cycle of death and rebirth, so could they have been right all along?
My vision remained dark, I couldn't see a thing, and I could not begin to try and open my eyes, which I guess makes sense because technically, I was just born minutes earlier, though it still irked me. My hearing, however, was getting better. I heard fragments of the words that the voices spoke, and I got a rough idea of what they actually said.
"Oh - look at him! He's such a precious little thing, isn't he?"
At least she sounded somewhat similar to my own mother. I hoped that she wouldn't be a mother who could care less about their children. I'd hate to be stuck with a despicable woman like that for years. Although she will probably never be like my own mother.
The one who actually gave birth to me. The one I had to leave behind, without saying a word.
I got a few snippets more of what the three said, but nothing struck out as being too odd or unusual (There was something else that confused and slightly irritated me, the third voice did sound a little like my "mother" but she rolled her s's for far longer than what anybody with even an inkling of knowledge about the English language would normally say) except for one other thing.
"I know -, what a fine looking owlet we have here. I know that he'll do great things when he grows up, I can feel it in my gizzard as plain as the night sky!"
He obviously said more but it was becoming harder and harder to hear what exactly the three were saying. I think I was falling asleep again. My new dad sounded excited at the prospect of a worthy heir, but I found myself sorely lacking in this new vocabulary they used.
Gizzard. I knew what it was, it's something that a lot of birds have, and also maybe a food that you eat at a local KFC, but I don't see how it could be used to judge something or someone, nor how you could ever feel such a thing. Maybe it was like how people sometimes go with their gut feeling. I was honestly more concerned with the thing he said before talking about the night sky and organs of birds found battered and fried at a restaurant.
Owlet.
He was talking about me, right? It couldn't have been anyone else in the vicinity, he was without a doubt, describing what I was. Who I could be.
As an owlet.
I wasn't that daft to not know what an owlet was. Owlets were basically baby owls, and now I must be one of them. No human calls their child an owlet, except maybe the mentally unhinged who really shouldn't have kids in the first place, but I digress.
The idea of me being an owl started to make me more and more anxious about the numerous things that owls had to do in order to survive in their daily lives. If they didn't, they would die.
Things like, hunting and gathering food, which would have been alright with me, if I didn't recall that all owls were carnivorous in nature, so the prospect of eating any kind of vegetable went right out the window. No berries, mushrooms, nada, Zilch. Unless the owls of this place, this world, had a different diet than the ones back home. The chances of that were sadly low, so I ruled that out as a possibility.
Then there was the reversed sleep schedule, owls typically slept during the day and woke up at dusk. I was a night owl growing up (the irony in that was not lost to me), but I don't think I'll ever get used to sleeping during the day. Not for a good long while.
There was one more thing that stood out from everything else, completely eclipsing my previous worries over being an owl. It was something that I will admit, scared me to my core.
Flying.
I know that the fear of flight was slightly abnormal, but everybody has something that frightens them, everybody has a weakness. And mine was flight. Although it wasn't always like that. Once there was a time where I wanted to fly. I wanted to see the world from up above, looking down at the people below. The wildlife, trees, rivers, oceans, clouds.
When I was a little kid, no older than eight years old, my parents had the bright idea to buy plane tickets to Hawaii for the summer. We'd go on vacation for about two weeks sleeping in a decent hotel in Oahu, the capital city of the island state. It sounds great, doesn't it? Who wouldn't want to go to an island known for its beaches, warm clear ocean blue water all year round, a unique ecosystem unlike anything we have in consistently cold Maine, and so many other great things. You'd be an idiot to not want to go, right?
Oh, how wrong I was.
On that dreary day (really any day was just that to be honest), we packed up all our bags in the early morning and me, my brother, and my sister were ushered into the backseats of dad's worn-down yet somehow still functional truck. As usual, I sat in the middle, my brother to my left, and my sister to the right. Mom complacently rested in the front seat (It was really freaking rare for her to be awake when dad was driving) while dad fiddled with the GPS and the rear-view mirror. He peered up at the reflective surface and smiled at us with his trademark lopsided goofy grin that never failed to put us in a good mood for the day.
"Are you kids ready for the greatest vacation of your lives?" He asked, putting in a small amount of energy into the question. The amount of times me and my brother, and even my sister, said yes over and over could have ranged from twenty, to two thousand.
"Yeah daddy, I'm so pumped for this vacation!" My brother Dylan, the most vocal out of the trio, had exclaimed.
"I don't know about you guys, but once we get there, I am so gonna sleep in for the day." My sister Abby, always the one with the most plans to sleep anywhere, at any time, had tiredly stated.
"I want to see all the different animals daddy! There's dolphins, birds, sharks, and so many others that I can't say the names to," I'd said, my interest in ecology already starting to show.
Thing is, we were so jumpy and giddy for our vacation (at least me and Dylan) that we momentarily forgot that mom was still trying to catch some zz's. Dad put a finger to his mouth, shushing us, but it was too late. She grumbled under her breath about not getting enough sleep and shook around for a bit, trying to find the perfect sweet spot for her slumber. He let out a sigh, relieved that mom didn't go off on us with one of her infamous speeches about "Not being considerate to others," and "Not understanding how tiresome her job was". The message could not have been any clearer. Don't wake up a woman who hasn't slept for more than eight hours in a week, even if she's your mother.
It was one of the few times where I didn't mind sitting in the middle (the hump as I like to call it), because it was all going to be worth it. Me and Dylan played some co-op games on our Nintendo Ds's (Mario Kart was an all-star favorite for us) while our sister also funnily enough slept in a similar position as mom. The heavy sleeper gene was passed down from mother to daughter. Abby was older than both of us, and if we woke her up now, we would end up going to Hawaii in full body casts, so we put them on mute and quietly whispered to each other.
We arrived at the airport with our luggage in tow, checked in at the desk, and sat down on the drab seats, waiting impatiently for those precious words to be spoken on the intercom. Once they did, me and Dylan rushed to the jet-way, dad was dragging more of the heavier bags and was lagging far behind with Abby and mom letting out a synchronized set of yawns in front of him.
Dylan instantaneously called the window seat, and my mood was slightly dampened because now I had to sit in between my siblings for the second time today. A stewardess dressed in all blue gave us instructions on how to use our seat-belts (The population of people who don't know how to use it must be in the hundreds if they have to explain to it to us like toddlers) with as much energy as one could muster without passing out on the spot due to boredom.
The plane rumbled like a great beast of old as it began to take off the runway, and this is the moment of time where everything took a turn for the worse. An hour into the flight, something called turbulence was occurring, and it did not stop until the very end of the journey to the first airport at Texas. I tried many things to calm my nerves, like playing games with Dylan again, but that failed. I asked dad who was behind me for some gum, that also didn't work. I even went to the cramped bathroom, hoping that whatever was causing my debilitating discomfort could be related to my bodily functions. Nope, that wasn't it.
Wanna know what did work? It wasn't anything earth-shattering but it still works to this day, even if it has lost some effectiveness over the years. imagining I was with my family, doesn't matter where we were, as long as we were having fun. My dog Rocky, lying on my lap while we watched cartoons or cheesy sitcoms on TV. When we got off, the second plane in Texas left almost as fast as we had arrived, and this time, I was prepared.
The time we spent together in Hawaii swimming in the water with the waves rolling close by, making poorly constructed sandcastles and pretending that the plastic buckets were the towers, holding princesses who awaited their knights in shining armor, Sleeping in the hotel bed with my siblings as we drifted off into blissful slumber.
The time we had together before I left them, I never want to forget. Who and what I was, I hope I never forget.
Now I'm some nocturnal bird of prey, in a tree with animals masquerading as my parents in a world I don't belong in.
I swear, this might be the shittiest thing that has ever happened to me, and that was saying a lot. This was more shitty than my freaking death! And that was agonizing to deal with, just slowly ticking off the days until I finally died from something I had almost no control over.
Not only that, but now I'm the one who's supposed to fly. I'm the one who has wings now, even if I can't feel them right now, they're still there. They're still going to be there. For the rest of my "second" life.
This time, I am that airplane in the skies above. And I hated that.
Can't forget that I'm a baby bird, I'm going to be fed disgusting slop (way more disgusting than what humans feed their own kin) for at least a week or two. Maybe more if I'm not correct about how owls function in this God-forsaken place I found myself in. Now that I think about it, where even am I again? The voices weren't there anymore, I was back in the cold reaches of the dark for what, the third time now? Was this how it was like when I was first born, an empty space filled with absolutely nothing? That's just fantastic.
If you couldn't tell already, I'm already getting sick and tired of this place. There's nothing at all, and it wasn't like it was in my mind, if it was, then theoretically, I could create anything I wanted to. I could make a nice little forest for me to walk in, to take in those sounds that I grew to love over the years. Heck, I could even try to recreate my life again, back when everything was much simpler.
I've been beating around the bush awhile as to why exactly I died in a hospital prematurely as a teenager rather than an old man in front of my family and friends. I guess I ought to tell that to you sooner or later.
The reason why I died so early in life, is simply because of this.
Bad luck. Bad luck and bad judgment on my part.
I knew for a fact that if I hadn't went on that stupid road trip with some of my morally questionable and unpredictable, pseudo-intelligent friends, then I wouldn't be here. I knew I should've just stayed home, called up some of my actual friends. The people that always stuck by me through thick and thin no matter what.
If any of you are listening right now, if you can hear me through whatever means available to you, then… I'm sorry. I was being pressured by what felt like everyone in the entire school, and I forgot about you guys. I should have listened to you before any of this happened. I can't even cry in here. Whatever kind of forces that sent me here wouldn't allow it. One question was all that I wanted, some way, somehow, I just want to know one thing.
Why?
A deafening silence was my only answer . There's no god or any other supernatural entity to tell me what I wanted to hear, what I needed to hear.
I don't even know if there is one anymore.
In all my life, I have never felt so alone until now. It's a terrible feeling, knowing that there's nobody around who can feel your pain. Nobody to hold your hand, whispering sweet nothings softly in your ear. Nobody to speak to, to share knowledge with.
Taking away a thing that a lot of us, including myself, have neglected for years, is utter torture. Death could be a better alternative, but I know that's not true.
After all, I've died before.
The sound of my heartbeat returning to me once more signaled that my time was up. I was now returning back to the land of the living. I suppose that anything at this point was better than a cold, dark and desolate wasteland of space, but I suspected that this wouldn't be the last time I'd be here.
The darkness didn't go away immediately, par for the course, but my sense of sound returned to me, albeit slowly. I thought that the voices of my avian parents would have been practically gushing at the sight of me waking up from my slumber, yet I did not hear them. They were nowhere to be heard.
So, if I couldn't hear them, what could that mean? Did they leave me because I took too long to wake up? That seemed highly unlikely, they sounded quite excited and eager to witness my awakening into this world.
The rest of my senses returned to me, and I knew something was wrong, very wrong. As soon as the sense of smell came rushing back to me, a disturbing realization smacked me right upside my head, and smashed it down onto the ground below.
SOMETHING WAS BURNING.
I really do doubt that owls in any world could utilize grills and have family barbecues, so it must have been the trees. A fire was brewing, and I'm right in the middle of it. A heavy stifling smoke entered my nostrils, causing me to cough painfully as it reached into my tiny little lungs. No child, let alone a newborn baby, could resist the effects of smoke inhalation for long, and I was no exception. I had to get out of this place, preferably right now.
There were two major problems that I had to overcome, and I have no idea how to solve them. First, I have almost no knowledge of how my body functions now. Two, how was I even going to get out of here if I've just been born very recently?
Regardless, I had to try. I don't plan on dying for a second time, and whoever brought me here (if someone actually did bring me here) would surely be furious if I died right now.
I painstakingly began to open my eyes, wincing in pain when the smoke felt like it was seeping into my eyeballs. It didn't take long until I could finally see where I was born at, and more importantly, where to escape from the infernal flames. What I saw was not surprising to me. An owl's hollow wrapped in wildfire, shrouded by nature's tried and true method of cleansing the earth.
And I was right in the middle of it.
My first official step into this new, alien world ended up with me falling flat on my face onto what felt like a makeshift bed made out of an assortment of materials owls used to make their nests. Thankfully, it wasn't that painful, but now I had absolutely no clue how to get up again. I couldn't use my arms to lift myself up because I don't even have the upper body strength to pull myself back up. My arms didn't end in hands and fingers anymore. Dark thoughts invaded my mind like an army of ancient warriors marching forward, swords drawn and shields raised, and I didn't have the manpower nor the willpower to push them back.
Why should I even bother at this point? I'm going to die as a newborn freak of an animal. An anomaly among the masses.
An outcast.
Tears slid down my eyes, and my vision became blurry. There's nothing for me now, is there? I'm just going to die again, and I don't think that I can come back this time. The smoke and flames increased in their intensity, I started coughing violently and without pause, my heart beating faster and faster.
My entry into this world came as quickly as it went. There was no grand sendoff, nobody to witness my death this time. This time, I was dead for good. No coming back to a place I already left.
At least, I thought so...
Just before my inevitable death, I could faintly hear something over the sounds of the raging fire. It wasn't the sounds of branches or trees falling down, this sounded different. Something more organic, alive. And then, I finally heard something that I would never forget.
A calming voice in the eye of the storm.
"Everything's going to be okay little fella. You're not dying on my watch."
And with that, the world faded to black, yet again. The voice's reassurance gave me at least some semblance of hope. I had a feeling that this place wouldn't be such a cold prison of emptiness. Maybe this time, it would welcome me in with open arms. One thing was for certain...
Nobody deserves to die twice.
Somewhere in the reaches of space and time, a door will close. And so it will be, another one will open..