Crossing Over, Part I

It started as a nagging feeling, deep in the recesses of Mandy's mind, then it felt like her soul were slipping out the bottoms of her feet.  It was a sick feeling she had always associated with missing an important deadline while doing something non-essential.  But she couldn't put her finger on why.  

Gradually but persistently over the course of about an hour, but it felt like days, weeks, months, endless time, she felt like her very life had been sucked out of her body, like the world around her had emptied.  It was almost tangible, like the feeling of leaving a sauna with its thick, pervasive, almost suffocating atmosphere, to a cold, atmosphereless room filled with emptiness.  She felt unbelievably, incredibly alone.  Not just alone, but more alone than anything she had experienced.  She didn't feel lonely exactly but alone--like she was the only person in the world or in the universe.

When the void was complete, she stood there, in the middle of a parking lot on her way to her grey Accord, and just looked off toward the mountains in the distance and stared.  Empty, soulless staring.  She felt a bitter absence, a sense of loss, a deep depression, a sick uneasiness, a disgusting emptiness, a fragile meaningless, all at once.  It astonished her so much that she just froze, didn't move.  She wanted to vomit, to collapse, to die, to suffer, to hide, to disappear.  Hope had fled.  Meaning had evaporated.  She was a body without soul, without life, spirit, meaning, purpose, just an empty void.  And yet, she had her perceptions, she could see the mountains rising above the nearby trees, she could smell the early stages of autumn, she could hear wind pushing through the leaves in the linden next to her, she could feel the sun on her face, coolness of the air on her skin, feel the wind gently blowing her hair, she could think (her thoughts were only of death and despair, but she could think).

Eventually she sat down, then lay down, right there on the asphalt of the parking lot, its gravel poking into her arm and the side of her forehead, her eyes staring blankly at nothing.  She was enveloped in a sense of remorse and despair and sadness--deep, deep sorrow--that she had no capacity to contain.

She wouldn't notice until she stirred again, a couple days later, that there were no sounds of life, no birds, no children, no crickets, no cars, no people, that the leaves on the trees were curling, the weeds shriveling, the grass greying.  

Life as Mandy had known it was over.