death

I was in a large, bare room with three other people: a woman and a man who were conspirators and were plotting my murder, and a man I believed to be my ally. We had successfully evaded our enemies up to this point, but now we were trapped and our deaths were imminent. They did not force us, rather they compelled us to sit on two wooden seats in the centre of the room. The woman held a syringe in her hand, drawing out the moment. I looked at my friend, one last time, lamenting our premature end. The woman injected me with poison and I immediately died and became a ghost, separating from my dead body, though my spirit, invisible to the others, looked exactly the same as my body had looked in life. My ally stood and embraced the other two people; they did not kill him. It dawned on me that he was, in fact, a conspirator against me. I was deeply betrayed.
I travelled through the halls of the immense building. The rooms teamed with people, walking up and down stairs and riding escalators. Most people I passed could not see me, but every so often I encountered someone who could. These people did not seem to understand that I was dead; they assumed that, because they observed me, I was another living person. I began to realise that people had different levels of awareness and that they saw only what they could comprehend.
At the junction of three escalators, each leading upward in a different direction, I saw a young boy trapped in the space between them. He had somehow jumped the moving handrail into the gap and could not now get out as the mechanisms propelling the escalators - cogs and wheels and loud machinery - blocked his path. The only way out, it seemed, was to wriggle under one of the escalators, through the small gap between the motor and the floor, timing the exit so as not to be crushed by the moving parts. Most people seemed oblivious to his predicament as he did not cry or make any noise; indeed, it seemed that he was too afraid or embarrassed to attract attention to himself. He was focussed on learning the pattern of the machinery, hoping to shoot through the gap at the appropriate time. I joined him on the floor between the three escalators and gently held him back, knowing that the wrong move would lead to a gruesome death. I hailed down an old mechanic wearing dark blue overalls, happy that he could see me. He fiddled with the buttons of the escalators and switched them all off. The boy slid out through the narrow space and was gone. I, however, felt terror at having to go through the gap. Though the machinery had been switched off, the exit was suffocatingly small. I hesitated for what seemed like a long time before noticing another way out that I had not seen before - an opening like a doorway. I simply walked out of the space and the mechanic started up the escalators once more.
I walked up a flight of stairs and, at the top of the stairs, I saw my father. To my delight, he could see me too. I was not sure if he would be able to feel me, so I extended my hand and he held it. He could see me, hear me and touch me. Dad asked me if I was going to come back and live with him now, but I told him that I was held to this building until I finished whatever business I needed to before leaving Earth. We embraced and he went back home. There was no sense of sadness, only joy. I noticed how well and vibrant he looked and I could see that he had extremely developed awareness, that he was able to see and sense my spirit more than anyone else I had met.