[ MP ] A short story to go with this music .

The surface of the table beneath me felt cold, sending sporadic shivers in short waves up my spine, and I twitched with discomfort. The restraints around my wrists tugged firmly, bolting me to the surface I knew very well could soon be cradling my lifeless body. The straps across my chest compressed with what felt akin to the pressure of water twenty thousand leagues below the surface. *For a greater purpose*, I thought, attempting to reconcile with the hordes of nervous butterflies bustling about in my stomach. 
 
 The doctors entered the room. My eyes fell to the small mob of scientists peering anxiously through the observation window in the room next door. Nine years ago, I had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. In a regular appointment, my recap of the strange symptoms I ’ d been suffering from for the past few months prompted my doctor to schedule me an MRI, and they found a startling growth near my spine. Further investigation revealed that it was an aggressive and inoperable tumor. With chemotherapy, I had been able to fight it into remission, only to have it return after a few months of freedom. The same vicious cycle continued for several years, until this past year, when it returned again, this time stronger than before. Chemotherapy proved virtually useless against the strengthened tumor, and it began to spread around my spine. I lost sensation in everything below the waist for three months, until physical therapy helped me fight my way through it. With time, and more patience than I knew I had, I was able to walk again with a cane. 
 
 Six months ago, scientists that had been working tirelessly in a laboratory for God knows how long had a breakthrough on a project they were calling Looking Glass, a name that stuck with the program after its supposed completion four months later. It had only been tested on lab rats at this point, but the purpose of the project was to put the subject into sort of state between life and death, to allow the mind to shift consciousness into the afterlife, if there was one. The goal was to solve mankind ’ s longest lasting question. What happens after all of this? Scientists believed the answer was finally within their reach. 
 
 The project caught my attention. I was already practically dead. Doctors told me I had at the most, three months left to live, but that any day I could just fall asleep and never wake up. If I was fated to die at the young age of twenty-seven, what better way to go than in an attempt to become science ’ s greatest achievement in the history of humankind? 
 
 The doctors addressed the scientists in the next room, the sea of unknown, intrigued faces, then turned their attention to me. I looked up at them and tried to hide my fear. They gave me a cold rundown of what was about to happen. I would be put under the anesthesia, and once I was fully asleep, they would inject me with the serum the Looking Glass project had created. Once the injection was coursing through my veins, I would be nearly dead, and my mind would pass on to the other side, if there was one. I would remain in this purgatory for one hour, then the doctors would inject me with another needle, but this one would recapture my consciousness and bring me back into the world with them, and I would wake up unharmed - if everything went according to plan. 
 
 I nodded as best I could with my body pinned beneath the network of straps, leather shackles, IVs, and monitor cables, and took a deep breath hoping to hold back the tears of terror that were threatening to erupt from my eyes. I wanted with everything I had to scream and beg them to call the entire procedure off. *I want to live. I want to live! * My heart screamed for my mind to make the command, and mobilize my voice to put a stop to this. 
 
 The mask was fitted onto my face. “ Count backwards from ten, all the way down to zero, slowly, ” a voice calmly commanded, and I silently obeyed, ticking down what could be the final seconds of my life in the echoes inside my head. Although I spoke not a single word, each number pounded in my brain like the countdown of a NASA space launch. *Ten... Nine... Eight... * Feeling weary now, sluggish. *Seven.... Six....* It ’ s quiet.. So quiet. *Five... Four....* And I ’ m gone. 
 
 Blackness. There ’ s nothing before me, nothing behind me, and that floating sensation overcomes me. I have no thoughts, no emotions, and no sensations save this elated hovering feeling. And then, all at once, after what feels like an eternity, light begins to show - small at first, but growing rapidly into gorgeous shades of bright, vivid greens, blues, yellows on a canvas of the purest white I ’ ve ever seen. 
 
 It all erupts into a scene unlike any other I have ever seen. Indescribable, enrapturing, and I ’ m enamored by it. Peace washes over me like a cool silk. Before me stands a titan of a person, radiant in beauty as warm sunlight bathes its body, but before I can even take it all in, I ’ m being pulled away, as if something was tugging me away like a fish caught on a line, desperate to remain right here, but helpless to fight this unknown force. 
 
 I ’ m pulled back into the abyss of the darkest blackness, and the vivid greens, blues and yellows fade back into the pure white canvas until it ’ s no larger than a keyhole viewed at a distance, and then it ’ s gone. 
 
 I wake up on the operating table, the cold sending sporadic shivers in short waves up my spine, and I twitch with discomfort. I feel different from before. The doctors are there again, looking down at me with wide eyes. A room full of scientists next to me rushes to their feet, bodies pressed against the glass in awe. 
 
 For the next week, I ’ m pressed with questions ceaselessly. What did I see? What was it like? Always the same questions, and I always have the same answer. “ It was beautiful. More beautiful than I know how to explain. ” The follow up question, “ Did you see God? ”, and I answer them. “ I don ’ t know. I saw a magnificent creature more beautiful than any person I ’ ve ever seen on Earth, and I could physically feel its love for me, its everlasting care for my existence. It was not man or woman, but it did share a humanistic appearance with me. It did not speak to me, nor I to it, but yes, I got the overwhelming sense that I was looking at God. ” 
 
 My cancer was gone. In a follow up appointment with the doctors and scientists, I mentioned that the sensation had returned to my legs and that I wasn ’ t feeling the mind numbing pain in my back that I had grown accustomed to. Intrigued, they ordered an MRI, and it came back with stunning results. No cancer. No tumor. No signs that the deadly disease had ever once plagued my body. I was cured. They had found the cure for cancer and found a way to peer into God ’ s kingdom. 
 
 But I am not cured. Looking Glass had only swapped out the cancer for a far more excruciating ailment. I am plagued by my brief memories of a place far more awe inspiring than this wretched planet. Here, there is only suffering and madness. I had gone through my whole life falling in love with the nature around me in all of its beauty, but it fails to even parallel that which I saw in my short time on the other side. I ’ ve been driving myself mad, longing to see it just once more so that I might bask in the greatness that is just out of reach, on the other side. 
 
 It ’ s been two years now since my experience with Looking Glass, and I was the first of many to be a success of the program. It ’ s been two years of comparing my daily world to the unfathomably amazing. I sleep more than the average person does. I try constantly to revisit a fabrication of what I saw in my dreams, but my mind is not powerful enough to create such a place. 
 
 Today I am standing here in my apartment on a stool with a rope attached to my ceiling fan, a noose tied at one end. I fit the instrument of my death around my neck and tighten the knot so I can just barely breathe, and prepare to take the biggest step of my life. I smile a bit, knowing what I am about to return to. 
 
 I ’ m just about to take that step off of my platform when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror through my ajar bathroom door. Here I am, twenty-nine years old, now cancer-free, an icon of modern science, with a rope around my neck, ready to put an end to this life I ’ ve been given, and a thought enters my head. 
 
 I ’ ve seen Heaven first hand. I know it exists, for I have seen it myself. But if Heaven exists, so too must Hell below. If I take my own life, will I still go to Heaven? Or will I be damned to Hell for my suicidal sin, never to see the elegant afterlife I visited again? I decide I can not risk the latter, and climb cautiously down from my perch, where I collapse to my cold apartment floor in tears. 
 
 And the cold hardwood floor beneath me sends sporadic shivers in short waves up my spine, and I twitch with discomfort.
