I Died

I emerge from the forest to discover I died. Hauling my camping gear from the trailhead across the small parking lot allows my phone its first hint of a signal in two days and then the buzzing of notifications is relentless, throwing so much text and colorful little boxes onto the screen it takes a full minute standing there under the sun to sort this out. Someone has hacked my accounts, it appears, and posted a whole sad “This is Chris’s mother…” multi-paragraph thing about how I was hiking alone and inadvertently came between a grizzly bear and her cubs and that was that, that’s the end of Chris. We will miss him so much.

But I’m not dead obviously. I didn’t even see any bears while I was camping. I pinch a fold of skin on my right arm until it hurts so much I have to stop. This is how I know I’m alive. I also shout, for some reason, “Okay!” and I can hear myself and this, too, is how I know I’m not dead. Then on the other end of the lot I see a woman stepping out of her red Hyundai. She looks human, not angelic, not saying this in a derogatory way, just saying she’s an obviously human woman, and I yell “Hey!” at her. She stops in her tracks, of course, a weird guy trying to talk to her out here in the middle of nowhere and looks right at me and says “Hi.” Then I say, “Can you see me?” and she says “What?” Which is fair. She’s looking me in the eyes though.

I take out my phone and try to post “Hey guys, I think there’s been a misunderstanding here,” but my signal has dropped again, and so there’s nothing left to do except review all these very nice notes about me from people who think I’m dead. Or maybe they’re right. Maybe this is just how you find out. So I stand there, dead and alone again, because the woman got back in her car and left, and I don’t blame her. I turn my phone completely off and leave it on the pavement. I return to the trailhead, the blue sky and white clouds and all those redwoods looking like the towering gates of heaven, kind of. I enter.