Chrysalis was dead.
At last.
She knew that she had died peacefully, after all the trouble her suicide would put her family through, a peaceful-looking corpse that died a completely accidental death was what she owed them.
What she owed herself was a death free of resentment or longing, to ensure her soul did not linger in the space between life and death.What did she get for all her preparation?
The blank knowledge that she was dead.
She had gone to sleep, knowing she would die. There had been dreams, then a sense of falling abruptly than this feeling. This feeling of absolute certainty that she was no longer "alive".
The feeling was a sort of freedom. She felt boundless and formless. She was in a space that seemed to contain all of her, but it too, was infinite and undefined.
She was aware of herself and nothing else.
There was no body with which to experience the reality she was in, and if she had no awareness of herself she thought maybe there was no reality to be experienced.
She had no sense of time passing.
She thought that perhaps this was the result of a lifetime of resolutely refusing to believe that there was anything beyond death.
Except, this was not oblivion.
There should be no her to know that she was dead. She should be nothing.
She felt that perhaps she should try to sleep. After all death was the final sleep.
With that thought she felt a sense of movement. Her awareness of herself became suddenly sharply contracted and circumscribed. Suddenly she stood, she had a body, it's bare feet touching cool, dry, rough stone. She looked down, it was stone.
A warm yellowish brown, some kind of sedimentry rock-sandstone?
She hadn't been very interested in rocks. She hadn't been much interested in anything.
She looked around the room...or more like a box, as she turned in place in a slow circle.
There were no windows, there were no doors. The walls were roughly paved with unstained cement. There were no obvious light fixtures she could see, but the room was filled with an even fluorescent light.
She had completed a revolution and faced the original direction she had been facing when she came to be here.
There was a mirror in front of her.
She knows it hadn't been there before. It didn't look made of glass, but a shifting molten silver bordered by an unvarnished dark wood,(she knew even less of trees),the eerily slow moving surface made her shiver in this new form. The reflection in the slightly tilted, full length mirror wasn't her.
It was a stern faced, african woman wearing a square shaped, unbelted, brown floor length...garment.
Whatever this body that was now herself looked like, it was not what was reflected in the unnecessarily mystic mirror, her body was naked.
She looked impassively into hard,flat brown eyes and wondered if she was dreaming. This had happened after she thought of sleeping while she was ...somewhere else.
"You're not dreaming " spoke the woman.
Her voice was high and bright, like glass breaking, ringing sharply in her ears. Her speech was quick, her accent as familiar as home.
Chrysalis determined that they both have the South African "model -C " accent...she must-
"I'm not South African " the reflection interrupted firmly. "I look like this, and sound as I do, to be familiar to you, so as not to frighten you".
Her thoughts were open to this apparition.
She deliberately broke eye contact to look at the image in the mirror up and down and thought; at what stage in her life had such drab getup been fashionable?
She looked up at the stern face as it grew even firmer, pursed her lips as if to speak... and started thinking about how cheated she felt.
She had killed herself, she was dead she was sure.
But in this body;with breath flowing in and out of her lungs, her bare skin caressed by the ambient air in the enclosed space, the body's fight against gravity's drag_she also knew without doubt, that in this new reality beyond the death of the body she had lived in for thirty-eight years, she was alive.
So much for her hopes of an end.