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The back of his head kissed the pavement, sending a burst of kaleidoscopic colors across his vision like the flash of a camera's lens. Then, he inhaled. It felt oddly welcomed, like his lungs were happy for the air that he hadn't taken for a while, but there wasn't a rush. Maybe that's what dying felt like. His vision faded from black and he saw the sky; the faded, yellowing-blue of a midsummer sky nearing sunset, and wondered why he'd never seen it like this before. Maybe, again, it was part of dying. But he wasn't dead, he realized. He was alive—unmoving, but breathing, and very much alive.
He couldn't feel a single thing in all his body, but it wasn't tense or numb, just relaxed. Maybe his body didn't remember stepping off the edge of the abandoned school building, having mistaken it for a skipped step on his stairway and, being unready to die, didn't die—just woke back up, refreshed.
Then he blinked.
The pain overcame him like orgasm: a nightmarish parallel orgasm, laden with stinging, burning, aching, stabbing, jabbing, piercing, pinching sensations all at once without waning. He clenched his eyes shut and arched his back with the pain, but that only made it worse as he realized the bones broken throughout his frame. In his feral agony, he dragged his nails on the pavement, but the pain of their breaking and splitting was miniscule in comparison to the rest. His jaw was unhinged to make way for any unintelligible, pained groans, but none came and it was as silent as it had been when he'd been falling through the air.
No one was around for miles; he knew that. He hadn't anticipated needing any help once he was dead, nor did he want any attention from it—that's why he picked his old high school in the first place. But now; now that he couldn't form any thoughts and the pain was beginning to numb into a constant, dull glow, he turned his ear to the pavement to look out at the barren landscape.
The empty parking lot suddenly filled with the ghosts of his past peers, the silence replaced by the light chatter of teens as they walked into the school at a slow, steady rate in groups of twos or threes. He sat as an audience to the scene, watching as people he once knew, their youth still intact, walk happily and care-free into the place they came to grow. As it passed, there was one hallucination in particular that haunted him; one hallucination he wished more than ever was real. The two girls walking together, their hair flowing freely behind them as they carried their books, chatting about their lives in a way he missed more than he'd like to admit. At the door, they meet another friend of his: a best friend he had once. A roommate, too. He kissed the redheaded girl, took her hand and they walked into the building together, the three of them.
As he lay there, he began to feel the memory slipping from between his fingers, and in a desperate, breathless attempt to recapture it, he extended a hand to his old friends—trying to call out to a girl he once knew; trying to get her to forgive him for all he ever did wrong.
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