Replay

Chapter 2

2

People think they understand time. They think it always means the same thing: sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, the same everywhere, in every universe, in every situation because we say so.

But it’s not true. I know that now. Time is a line, stretching out forever. It’s fluid. It’s loose. It stretches and it bends, and seconds in one place can be hours in another.

They’ll say I was just hallucinating. That my brain was deprived of oxygen, and it made pretty pictures for me, and what I saw wasn’t real. But I know what I know. I was there. And it was as real as anything I’ve ever been through in my life.

They’re all so careful not to talk about it. Forty-two seconds gone from my life, and no one even thinks to ask where I was?

Well, almost no one. For the first couple of days, Beth was all over me.

“What was it like? Could you tell you were dead? Did you see anything?”

I always lied, even though I’m not supposed to do that anymore. But I just don’t think my thirteen-year-old sister can handle what really happened to me. Especially since I’m not really sure myself.

So I told her I didn’t know anything was going on. That it was just like being asleep.

“Did you dream?”

“No, not really.”

Beth is not known for giving up. “So you didn’t feel anything? You couldn’t tell that something was wrong? You didn’t feel . . . different?”

No, no, and no.

But of course the answer’s yes. Yes to all of it: Yes I felt it, yes I knew, yes everything has changed.

Because now I understand Time. And how meaningless it is. And that I’m such a small part of it. This one life of mine—this Cara Lily Campbell life, 616 N. Waverly Street, Pinedale, Colorado, born February 3rd, parents Ron and Gretchen, sister Beth—this life is just one tiny speck of a moment among the huge vastness of Time, and for sixteen years I’ve been acting like my stupid life is the biggest deal in the world.

Well, I’m over that.

It’s hard to hang on to your delusions when you die on the operating table and find yourself a n***d blob of light plopped down in the middle of a card game with four other n***d blobs of light in a cold gray place that might be heaven, although I’m still not sure. That’s one of the things I have to figure out.

That, and why I woke up thinking about David.