"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live."
Norman Cousins
It's over.
My body was no more than a broken shell even less than it has been these passed twenty years. There is nothing but my shame and my betrayal left in this world and this plane of consciousness. I am leaving, every part of me is becoming something greater and I don't deserve it. My robotic fingers clutch the cold metal floor as if attempting to stay.
But I know I cannot.
I'm slipping into unconscious waters, travelling farther back in a dusted area of my memory. Back to a place of water and flowers…
I opened my eyes and saw nothing but the vague outline of her. My heart swelled and ached at her touch, at her soft rose pedal fragrance. Dim gray light defined her slender silhouette. My fingers found her face, tangling in her brown hair. I felt her lips uttering soft unheard words in the everlasting twilight of my muted reality.
And then I smacked against the hard metal ramp: an image of her lying in an open casket her fingers forever clasping a small childishly carved pendent. She was clothed in the deep blue water of the lake. Her hair entwined and tangled with white flowers. She's been waiting for me.
But this time, I did something right. And as my body fails me, I truly begin to feel again. It's over and the new world beckons for my destruction.
My broken breaths squeaked and rasped as they had never before. After two long and arduous decades of barely surviving, letting the darkness consume me, the machines that imprisoned me here were finally failing. It was done. My prophecy. After all these years, after being so lost, after so much suffering; it was done.
If I could weep, there would be tears running down my scarred cheeks and sparking with the respirator at my mouth.
I needed to see him: my son.
The red filter that allowed my eyes to see fuzzed and the world was fading. But I couldn't let him go like this. I can barely make out the words to tell him to free me from this prison, take this metal bandages off, let me look at him with my own eyes.
A breath.
My last one.
And I'm free. But it's hopeless. I cannot see him. My retinas scream at the incoming light long held off by my prison. I am blind from living in the darkness for so long. But I can hear him through my damaged and scarred ears. I know he looks at me with sadness and pity. I couldn't blame him, I was a pale, scarred creature decimated and ruined long ago.
I am going to save you.
And then I looked beyond my dead scarred eyes, through my inner eye inside my damaged soul. I saw his blue eyes. They were my blue eyes as I should have been.
My mechanical arms and legs lay like metal skeletons. My bones have moved their last. My lungs burn as they had long ago but now it's different. I cannot feel the pain as I once did. I don't flinch or scream. The fire in my heart has long since extinguished. The voices from my past are calling me.
Even those I had killed.
She's waiting for me. I can see her even with my blind eyes: her face as radiant as the day I first saw her. There's nothing but light about her now. They're all waiting for me.
"You already did." Was that my cracked and rasping voice speaking?
My words blurred as the vision of her strengthened. She smiled down at me and behind her I saw my best friend. All those I had betrayed.
I wasn't worthy of their company.
But when she held out her hand, I grasped it with human fingers.