There is a whole, something that I can't comprehend that has taken over me, turned me into someone lesser than the person I used to be. Though I don't fully understand how or why this has happened, a part of me realizes that it can not stay like this and there must be something that I can do to put it to a stop. I look into Horatio's blue eyes; I can't feel anything, a cold that has permanently made a home in my body and then all of the sight and the sound, the chaos and raw smell of my own blood and glass bursting is not there. It is empty, all so empty.

I don't remember anything about dying. Funny how you seem to ebb in and out of consciousness. My mind could picture each of their faces as I was pulled against my will into the hole, this hole of black, this hole of silence. I don't remember them being happy now. All of the times that they were frightened, weak, caught off guard... No, I don't want to remember them that way.

It isn't right.

It isn't fair.

Last moment thoughts begin to cloud my brain. Is this just something surreal? Perhaps I am truly not dead and just imagining this whole thing. Maybe I'll wake up in my bed tomorrow with a bad headache and find out that I wasn't shot, I wasn't in the middle of that mess... I just thought I waas, feared I was.

There is no pain, there is no emotion. The iciness of my last breath is ripped from my lungs as I find a point on the ceiling to stare at... and I can't look away. Can't turn my face to take in his comforting visage, that tells me everything is going to be all right. Can't say that I am scared and want to scream but I can't feel my mouth.

He's not there anymore. The place where I have died is no longer there. My tomb... my bed... my final resting place as I have come to let it be known. People didn't rest in their graves after the funeral and the thousand tears and kisses goodbye. They stayed at that place where their lives were taken from them... if their lives were taken from them against their will, in which mine was.

I cannot see myself, I cannot feel myself, just an image, a carbon copy of the person I used to be, laying like a frail ghost in the cold wet air of the Miami jewelry store. It is not the same as seeing... I can... sense their sadness and their grief, actually feel the water running down their cheeks as if it were slipping down my own, the zillions of crazy and unthinkable ponderances racing and crashing in their fatigued heads. I am not a part of them... but I can still feel it. It doesn't make sense. It is not fair. But then again, life never is, is it?


TBC...