My time, which feels simultaneously endless and momentary, is split between the living realm and floating in a beautiful abyss of nothingness. A sea of total darkness, with small bursts of light throughout and no definition between me and the nothingness. I am as much a part of it as it is of me. I’m peaceful in this nothingness, but there’s a sense of limbo. As though I’m in some kind of ethereal waiting room until the universe has decided I’m ready for the next stage.

At times, undetermined by me, I slip from the nothingness and into the living realm. There, just by thinking it, I’m able to move from one spot in the room to another, where I spread into things or hang in the air like dust particles. I am aimless and powerless, but there’s this feeling that I’m there to do something and I just don’t know what it is yet.

When I’m in the living realm, memories appear in my consciousness like scheduled commercial breaks—unbidden and determined by something outside me. As though it’s all part of a greater plan, one that I have yet to be made aware of. This is death, knowing all and knowing nothing at once.

The first time I shifted from the nothingness to the living realm, I arrived in June’s bedroom. She was rolled up in a mess of sheets on her bed—a sloppily constructed cocoon of sorrow. The blind was pulled down against the daylight, but a stubborn thin line of sun at the bottom broke its way into the warm, stuffy room.

I remembered that I’d seen her like that before. After her divorce. She’d left the family home, moved into a townhouse, put the bed together, and then she hadn’t gotten out of it for almost two weeks.

I went to say her name but quickly learned there’s no such thing as talking when you’re dead, so the word came out like a thought. Still, she lifted the covers, revealing her messy short black hair. Her blue, puffy, bloodshot eyes darted around the room. I thought her name again, concentrating even harder this time.

She squinted. “May?”

June. I’m right here. Words so clear and loud to me did nothing to penetrate the silence of the room. She pulled the covers back up over her and moaned like a wounded animal.

I stayed in that room as long as I could, talking at June, begging her to get up. I called her names, apologized, soothed her, challenged her. I tried every tactic until I became depleted by the effort and started fading away from the space.