TW: Suicide, death, just in case, not in detail.

They found the secret a long time ago; the secret to the after. People had always wondered that, hadn’t they? What happens after you die? Is there a soul? Well they found it, indeed they did. Almost as precisely as the religions had called it; good deeds sent you to paradise, a glorious beyond, all that you could wish for while bad deeds left you with nothing but regret and punishment for eternity. What about those there were neither though? Those that were neutral or didn’t last long enough to do good or evil?

Turns out they come back, or came back should I say because no one comes back anymore. Reborn anew they were, a great stream of souls coming into the world and then fading out of it, those deemed worthy or evil taken out of it, they found that secret a long time ago, someone came back with memories of the after, then many people and by then it couldn’t be ignored. Good deeds skyrocketed, the world became a utopia as peace was settled and all came together in harmony. They didn’t try and stop death anymore, why bother? All you had to do was be good until you died and you’d be sent somewhere better, there was no need for medical advances anymore, illnesses were treated as a good thing, funerals were celebrations! Envy was of the dead, not the living, everyone eagerly awaiting the time they were snatched away and sent to the great beyond.

I wish the problem had been more obvious back then than it is now but then again, maybe they didn’t know the truth? That stream of souls was finite it turns out, no new souls were added to it, it didn’t get replenished, once one was taken out that was it. So eventually the population declined, sharply too, still there were celebrations, each death was good it meant that everyone would go to paradise and could see each other again, life went on as normal even as the numbers dwindled, thousands turned to hundreds, hundreds to tens, tens to me. The last. No one thought about what happened to the last soul, they probably thought that the good they done would be enough to send them on but I was young when the last person died, I didn’t have time to do any good or enough good anyway. I was left behind, an empty world just for me.

At first it wasn’t so bad, I couldn’t do anything I wanted because I worried about consequences, maybe I had done enough to get me to heaven but I could eat what I liked, slept for as long as I wanted, I didn’t need to do anything but what I wanted. My first death was an accident. I tripped down my stairs one morning. Not a noble death I know but people have died in worse ways, I had been on my own for around eight years by that point. I didn’t die though, I woke up again at the bottom of the stairs, flat on my back. Sitting up I remember looking around and seeing droplets of blood, still wet but I was fine, there were no injuries. I rationalised it to myself that I had a cut on my head I just couldn’t find or had stopped bleeding because I’d knocked myself out for a few minutes.

It didn’t fully click until I died again.

I remember the ceiling of my kitchen staring back at me but it was blackened and scorched. I remember sitting up and looking around at the annihilated remains of my kitchen, I wasn’t sure what had happened but I suspect it was my gas stove, old thing, had finally given up after three decades, I didn’t know how to service or change it after all. I was naked and stumbled out of the wreckage of my burned home, not that it really mattered to be honest, I had already stashed my valuables away, those with sentimental value as nothing had monetary value in my world now, and I went into another home to wash and get clothes. It came to me when I saw myself in the mirror; I was younger, maybe only twenty four. Before I woke up on the kitchen floor I was in my forties but I’d been too neutral. The time at the stairs wasn’t a bad fall; I’d killed myself and came back to life because I was stuck on earth. The foundations of life and death couldn’t put me in a new body because there weren’t any so they rebuilt my own at its prime and brought me back.

I spent decades in despair after that although I don’t really remember most of it. I tried killing myself after my fourth century, just to see if it was evil and would send me somewhere other than my desolate world. There were no animals anymore, their souls were gone I assumed, there was just me, the only living being left. No luck, I woke up surrounded by blood, clutching cold steel in my hand, the barrel of the gun had cooled. It always seems to take a few minutes for me to come back, sometimes a couple of hours if the way I die is particularly bad. I always wake up in my prime, unscathed, with a full stomach, prolonging my life.

I remember breaking for a while, scratching ‘Let me die’ everywhere I could but it didn’t change anything, I got over that. Started committing suicide when things got real bad, brought everything back into focus. I wrote in journals and notebooks but now they’re all gone, rotted away, almost everything has rotted away, the strongest of rock still stays, my flesh stays, my clothes did not, neither did paper or food, it’s hard to stay alive for too long now but I’m still barely cultivating vegetables to keep myself going and water isn’t too hard to come by.

Sorry, got distracted, scratching all of my thoughts out helps keep me sane, feels like a conversation after a while. Pretty sure I can’t actually talk anymore, pretty sure I don’t want to.

You lose track of time after a while when you’re immortal. You get a daily schedule going to the point that you zone out and nothing else matters. There’s no electricity, there’s nothing to really amuse me anymore so I sleep, I eat, I tend to my plants and I go back to sleep, day in and day out. Occasionally I die but that’s routine now, need to do it if I get sick or if I hurt myself some how, there’s no medicine after all but death is the best medicine for me.

I know I spent some time traveling the world a long time ago, checking to see if there was anyone else left that I could do a good or evil deed to, even an animal! There was nothing though, all of it was gone and I came back to where I started, a dead paradise, forgotten by everything but time and myself. When my paper faded I started using rock and chalk I found, scratching or marking the ground, making little shelters so that the rain wouldn’t wash away my hard work, a lot of it is gone though, the winds eroded it all away. I got to watch that, wind erosion is fascinating, being able to mark its progress across thousands upon tens of thousands of years was interesting. Now I write my last moments, an obituary as it were although only I can read it.

The last light in the sky went dark a few hours ago, pretty sure that means I’m not going to last too long, my star has grown so large now, bright and red in the sky. It’s beautiful, I have to say but I know what it means, I wasn’t entirely ignorant back then. This world is going to be gone soon and hopefully I’ll go with it. Any day now it’s going to expand, any day now everything I am, everything I have ever done will be gone and I couldn’t be happier. I find myself smiling as I realise this.

I’m dying frequently now, only able to scratch out a few words before the heat takes me again. I don’t mind. The red consumes the sky, like blood in water and if I could cry I would cry with joy. I write now only because I hate being without an ending. So here it is.

I am the Last. The one that sits at the edge of infinity.

I do not feel fear, I do not feel despair.

I just want it all to end.

Goodb