SPECTRAL.

† T W O †

     WHEN I TELL YOU I DIED THAT NIGHT, I don't mean it as a metaphor. I don't mean it like when people say, I was so embarrassed, I could've died. No, I mean I left. My body was broken in the wreckage, and something inside me slipped loose.

     And I found myself in a place that no nine-year-old should ever see.

     Let me ask you something. What do you think you know about the afterlife? Do you picture pearly gates? Do you see warm light and long-lost relatives waiting for you with open arms? Do you imagine fire and punishment, demons crawling beneath red skies?

     Now let me ask again, what do you really know about it?

     Because where I went, it wasn't light. It wasn't fire. It wasn't the storybooks, and it wasn't the movies.

     It was the abyss.

     I don't have another word for it. It was a depth so wide and so empty that it felt endless, but not like standing on a beach looking at the horizon. No—this was deeper, heavier, darker. It was emptiness with weight, as if the void itself was pressing down on me, squeezing the air I didn't even need anymore.

     I was a little girl, lost in it. There were no paths, no signs, no escape. Just this… drowning silence. Blackness that wasn't just around me but inside me, pulling at my thoughts, unraveling me thread by thread. I thought the scariest thing in the world was monsters under the bed, shadows in the closet. But I was wrong. The scariest thing in the world is nothingness. The terrifying realization that you might not matter at all in an expanse that has no beginning, no end, no care for whether you exist.

     And still, there was a hum. That's what I remember most about the abyss. A low vibration, constant, like the whole space was alive and breathing in some frequency I wasn't supposed to hear. The sound shook me, not in my ears, but in my bones—or whatever passed for bones when you don't have a body anymore.

     People say death is peaceful. They say you don't feel pain. Maybe that's true for some. But what I felt wasn't peace. It was confusion. It was terror. It was the deep, gnawing certainty that I didn't belong there but had no way out.

     And that, I've learned since, is the edge of death.

     The edge isn't a doorway you just walk through. It's a cliffside with no railing, where your soul teeters and sways in a storm you can't fight. You don't control it. You don't choose whether you fall or step back. Something else decides that for you. Something bigger, older, and far less kind than people imagine.

     The truth about the afterlife? It isn't one place. It isn't a neat, organized system with heaven on the right, hell on the left. It's fragmented. It's layered. Some people slip into light, some into torment, and some—like me that night—into the abyss.

     And the soul… the soul is more fragile than anyone knows. It isn't some glowing orb, some shimmering wisp floating prettily into the clouds. It's raw. It’s the stripped version of you, vibrating, aching, pulled in a thousand unseen directions. It carries memory, fear, hunger, but none of the comforts of the body. Imagine being naked in a freezing storm, with no shelter, no anchor, no promise it will ever end. That's the soul.

     That was me.

     I don't know how long I stayed in that depth. Maybe minutes. Maybe years. Time didn't exist there, not in any way I understood. But I remember screaming. Not with a voice, but with everything I was. Screaming for someone to hear me, for my dad, my mom, for anyone.

     And then, something changed.

     It wasn't light. Not yet. It was more like a crack forming in the dark. A faint pulling sensation, like a rope had been thrown into the abyss and snagged me by the chest. And suddenly I wasn't drowning anymore. I was rising, dragged upward, out, back.