Nirvana

Prologue

My name was Nadia Elaine Lockhurst, and I died when I was fourteen years old. You might say that my death is a shame, and fourteen is far too young to die. The way I see it, I had it coming for awhile, and although I did not commit suicide, it was close enough. The way I see it, my short life may not have taught me a whole lot about adulthood, but I learned enough about living.

Here, adulthood doesn’t matter. Here, or whatever you want to call where we go after we die, all that matters is living, and fairness, and wisdom. Wisdom is a big part of what this place embodies. People need to be mature; so when we are sent back we can hopefully change the world and teach people some lessons we weren’t fortunate to learn with the time we had on Earth. It’s funny how efficiency plays into everything, anywhere. It’s all about doing something, learning something, teaching someone, in the amount of time given to you.

Really, the afterlife is just a holding place for the spirits that are going to be sent back down to Earth. We aren’t sent back as actual people though, every single baby born in the world is given a clean slate, because the people upstairs fear that a recycled person would not capture the essence of living. No, the purpose of the afterlife is to learn lessons that were not learned during our lives, and to be sent back to teach the people alive now, so the world will hopefully learn something and stop acting like primates.

It’s hard to be sent back though. The whole goal is to make everyone be sent back at least once. Apparently it’s some enlightening experience. You need to be completely prepared to live again, because here is quite different than Earth. We need to make sure we learn all the proper lessons. We need to make sure we’re good at teaching others. And that we know how to have fun, because we wouldn’t make a difference unless we acted like actual humans. So we’re allowed, encouraged even, to loosen up and have some fun here in the afterlife. It is almost ironic how everything here has to do with making sure we better the place we came from.

But before I go into more about “Nirvana” as I love to call it, I should tell you my story. I always loved the word Nirvana, and so that is what I call “here”. Every person has their own name for this place; every person has their own story. Here is Nadia Elaine Lockhurst’s story, and how she came to Nirvana.

Chapter One

If someone were to have told me that Thursday, September 6, 2007 was going to be my last day on Earth, would I have spent my day differently? Would I have told my family and friends that I loved them, would I have hopped on a plane to Europe and seen the world? Here is my answer when everyone asks me this here in Nirvana: No, or else I wouldn’t even be dead and here in the afterlife. If I had told my family that I loved them on that last day, I wouldn’t have been angry, and wouldn’t have decided to go and sit in the rain hitchhiking on the side of a highway. If I had hopped on a plane to Europe , I would not have been sitting in the rain on the side of the highway hitchhiking. I didn’t do that, and I died, so there is no point in asking what I would have done differently. But I will tell you exactly how I ended up hitchhiking, in the rain, on the side of a highway on Thursday, September 6, 2007, and how it led to my death.

My parents and I argued, but not a lot. When we did argue, however, it was huge. When we were in a fight, there were two sounds in the house, silence when we were asleep, and yelling when we were awake. Usually we got along OK, though. For some reason I could tell when we were going to have a bad day and start screaming about every thing imaginable: my weight, my attitude, me writing stories so much, me not getting enough exercise, what post office to go to. I could tell that the week of Thursday, September 6, 2007, was going to be one of those weeks.

We’ll start my story exactly two hours before my death. I was sitting at my desk, working on a story that I was really into. I loved to write, that was what I did whenever I needed to do something. I often wonder if I was even good at writing, if I had the “talent” people said I did. Anyone can think of words. Anyone can decide the way to arrange a sentence. Anyone can tell a story if it’s there own. Sometimes I used to wish that I could paint, or sing, because you had to be good at that kind of thing. Writing, well, it was writing, and although I loved it, I thought I might not be good enough to consider myself a writer. All I ever wrote was useless teen stories, with either an amazingly cheesy life lesson about taking nothing for granted, or a stupid drama with no theme at all.

But I was sitting at my desk, and I heard the door slam and the smell of Chinese food.

“I’m home!” my mom called out in the random direction of my room, knowing that I was in there and writing a story.

“OK!” I screamed, frustrated at being interrupted. I could hear her clanging the plates around, expecting me to come out and help. My mom was so controlling! I felt my mood radically shift, as it sometimes did, and a few silent tears slid down my cheeks for no reason at all. Once again blaming my mother for my emotions, I muttered a few things under my breath, walked into the bathroom that was adjoining my room, and splashed cold water on my face. “God!” I shrieked when the water did not bring down the horrible puffiness in my cheeks that always showed up when I cried. My mother came swooping into my room and said,

“Don’t you say the Lord’s name like that! Now get out there in the kitchen and eat your dinner! And after that you will go for a walk around the block, you desperately need exercise.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t need exercise if you wouldn’t bring home take out every night.” I shouted. My face was red with passion, and I could feel my own pulse as I stormed out of the room, ate a single piece of sesame chicken, and then walked out the door. Right before I left, my mother shrieked,

“Nadia Elaine Lockhurst! How dare you! Do you know how hard I work? How much I’ve sacrificed for you?” My temper escalated even more, and the last thing I ever said to my mother was,

“Yeah? Well then maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to have kids. Maybe you should have thought about what a horrible, imperfect daughter you’d have, and then you could have lived your life without me. So don’t you tell me I chose to be here. Don’t try to lay it all on me like you always do. Some things are your own fault.” And I slammed the door.

I stormed down the street, the adrenaline still pounding through me, as if I had just used up all of my energy in the last fight my mom and I would ever have.

A light drizzle pounded on the ground, making the ground slick. I had to get away, this was the last straw. I headed toward the highway, which was about a quarter mile from my house.

The walk was short, wet, and muddy. I had a compact mirror in my pocket, and I opened it to look at my reflection right before I stepped onto the highway. My brown eyes appeared to glow from the exercise, and my light brown hair had mud in it. I didn’t have freckles, but my skin was uneven. I snapped the compact shut, distractedly looking at a lone truck down the road. Maybe they could take me to my aunt’s house in the next town over. I stepped onto the shoulder, took a deep breathe to gain confidence, and extended my thumb.

The truck pulled over and a balding man of about forty opened the door. He helped me walk to the passenger side, which was facing ongoing traffic, and then asked where I was going.

Right then I should have known something was wrong. I had never hitchhiked in my life, but I knew from the movies that the person who pulled over asked where you were headed before they let you in. I ignored the voice that spoke up in the back of my head and got into the truck. We had been driving for about fifteen minutes, only about two miles from my aunt’s town, when I noticed that only one of the man’s hands was on the steering wheel… the other was creeping dangerously close to my leg. I pretended to sneeze, and pulled myself away from him. He smirked.

“What are you afraid of, darling?” he asked. My forehead crinkled in disgust. His green eyes twinkled. I shifted in my seat again, but this time his hand caught my arm and tried to tug at my shirt. I hit his arm away, and demanded that he stop, but in vain. His mouth was inching toward mine, and I could smell his sour breath. I noticed that the hand that still gripped my arm had a wedding band on it. This disgusting man was married, and he was trying to seduce me!

“Get away from me!” I shrieked. Now he was leaning even closer to me, his eyes were eating up my form. I hated being looked at, and I screamed even louder. I tried to slap him across the face, which was the only defense technique I could think of. He dodged my slap, and the man’s arm began to trace patterns up and down my arm. I screamed at him to stop, I begged him with angry tears running down my face. The balding man only found this amusing, and his fingers traced my swollen cheeks that puffed up when I cried. I finally grew so enraged and frightened that I unlocked my door, tugged the handle, and freed myself of his grasp. I forgot that there was oncoming traffic.

My fall wasn’t as graceful as I thought, and I landed on my leg, in the middle of the opposite lane. I felt a terrifying crack, and I knew I had sprained something in my leg. The man in the truck simply shook his fist out the window and kept on moving. I lay there, clutching my leg, forgetting to breathe. I saw distant headlights, and I tried to inch my way to the side of the road, but it was too late, I couldn’t make it, my hurt leg made me slow. I waved my arms and began to scream: “MY NAME IS NADIA ELAINE LOCKHURST! STOP! STOP! PLEASE, STOP! STOP!” I was crying again, but the car never saw me. The tires were soon a foot from my sprawled out body, and that’s when I whispered, very quietly,

“I wonder if it’ll hurt. I wonder if people will miss me. I wonder… did I learn anything here?” Then the horn blared, and I was run over by a car. My last breath was a deep one, and for one instant, before everything went black, I saw my own face, looking like an angel, and it whispered something. I strained to hear the angel that looked so much like me, and then I heard what it was saying, it was answering my last question that I had ever asked on Earth.

“You’ll never learn enough. There are lessons to learn later, now rest.”

I obediently closed my eyes, and the pain was quick. I don’t remember if I screamed, I don’t remember what the pain felt like, all I can remember is a feeling of being weightless yet chained down at the same time.

Little did I know that someone in Heaven was fighting for me to stay alive.