Iger Wickstein

It was my last chance.

It was my last chance and I tried not to show it. I had gone back to that moment so many times, I no longer had to pretend. I was trapped.

All the details, the rain falling like shards of glass, the screeching tires from the SUV, the streetlights blinking on and off, the bolt of lightning...they crashed through me just as surely as the thoughts that had run through my mind in that moment.

It was the end, the end of everything, and I was forced to relive it again and again. I should have died, but instead I became tethered to that moment. It was a simple question, whether or not I wanted a second chance, sometime after my death, in the in-between, after the light at the end of the tunnel. I said yes.

I had no idea what I was doing.

After the first time, I thought I could do it again and this time get it right. That's exactly what I thought. I went back again and experienced it all over again. And then I went back again. And again. And again.

I couldn't let go. It wasn't my life that flashed before my eyes, but my death, and it was of my own choosing. I couldn't let go.

It became almost like my life, a sequence of predictable, inevitable results, changed anew from new thoughts, new observations, new obsessions, new hopes, new delusions. The same thing happened again and again, I knew exactly what was coming, and I couldn't stop it, and I just kept repeating it.

What else was I supposed to do?

It was my life.

And my death.

Eventually it had to end, but not jus yet.

I persisted, I persevered, time and time again, until my last chance. I don't even know how I knew what it was, except that when it came around, that's exactly what I felt, as if it were my last chance. I was well past yearning for more. I was ready.

Everything repeated exactly as it had originally happened, all the details. I knew what would happen. It came. I died again, died for the last time.

After repeating it a thousand times, it was almost a relief, the end of everything, of all possible consequences, and the beginning of reflection, everything that I had denied myself in life. That's why I revisited my death so many times, because I was more afraid of my life than my death.

But then, aren't we all?