My Near-Death Experience (or, Another Missed Opportunity to Learn Something)

Then I remember going to the bedroom while the party was still going strong in the living room. I remember taking my clothes off and puking out of the window directly onto the plants. I blame the wine for that one. I remember lying down and closing my eyes with my head spinning, and then I remember the tunnel.

I say tunnel because that’s what people know. I didn’t really see a tunnel, although it was similar. With my eyes closed I could clearly see my formless self floating up in what looked like an eye of a storm. I looked around me and saw faces where the walls of the Hurricane were supposed to be, and I remember thinking that these people represented everyone I’ve ever met and everyone I’ll meet in the future and everything I’ve ever done and everything anyone else has ever done. It was the simplest thing in the world, just like the song: Everything was everything. I didn’t only see my past rolling like a movie before my eyes, I experienced everything I’ve ever experienced, and not only that: I experienced everything anyone else has ever experienced. Then I kept floating up, and the gray point in the sky became white, and then it grew bigger. It was calling me, just like they all say, and going there seemed, I can almost feel it again now, like the easiest thing in the world; like I was meant to go there.

But then—and I can’t say why—I realized that if I left the eye of the storm and floated toward the light I would never come back to the world, and the world—the real world—was something I was aware of again, and I was filled with love for the real world, and I wanted to stay in the real world and experience more of its beauty and pain, and that light, I remember thinking, would be there next time. I’d be back, but not now. I opened my eyes and felt alive. Then she came to the room and took care of me for a while.

She tells that story now, about the night I talked to God and puked out of the window naked. It is a funny image, I’ll give her that.