Seven Minutes

“Hi Deanna. Don’t panic. Everything will be explained in just a moment, I’ll be right back.” a kind-faced elderly woman says to me from behind what appears to be a receptionist’s desk. She smiles at me, her white teeth contrasting against her dark skin, before walking through a large door, leaving me alone.

I ease into the stiff chair I’m sitting in and cross my ankles. The reassurance from the woman was nice, but wholly unnecessary. I know I am dead. I once read that after you die, your neurons still fire for seven minutes, and I have to admit, I am quite surprised that my brain has decided to use the last seven minutes of consciousness to set me in what appears to be a waiting room. There are cream colored chairs identical to mine dispersed throughout the room, and while it feels sterile it has a sort of coziness to it.

There is a fish tank in the corner and soft music plays in the background, but the real highlight of the space are the framed jigsaw puzzles hung on the white walls. There must be at least fifty of them, placed strategically to look balanced despite the large variation in size.

I smile softly as I scan them all. Though they all depict different things, they all have a sort of mosaic quality to them; forged together in a colorful glass heap. The setting my neurons created might have been unexpected, but this being the decor my brain chose is not a shock in the slightest. There were not many constants in my 40 years of life, but ever since I was a kid no one could ever drag me away from a puzzle.

My attention snags on one across the room depicting a baby bird, and suddenly I am eight years old again in the parish life center of the church I grew up in, comparing blue puzzle pieces.

“That’s more of a robin’s egg blue than a sky blue, don’t you think?” a deep voice says from behind me.

I flinch at the voice of the youth pastor, but he is right; that definitely is going to be a part of the background of the picture, not the nest in the middle where I originally thought it would be.

“I think it goes…” he reaches around me and plucks the piece from my fingers “here.” He places it down and it fits perfectly between two pieces near the edge, and-

I snap myself from the memory. I have seven minutes until I fade into the abyss. I’ve gone decades without thinking about that, I refuse to let my final fleeting moments be tainted.

The woman from before enters the room again and goes behind the desk. I can hear the roll of a drawer opening and the scrambling of papers before she shuts it and walks back to the door, holding a file.

“So sorry about the wait, come with me.” she says and walks through the door, not waiting for me to follow. I consider staying put because it shouldn’t be that much longer and I am exhausted, but considering I am about to enter an eternal sleep and my subconscious has seemed to put in a great deal of effort to form some sort of afterlife, I pull myself out of the chair.

The hallway through the door is long and like the waiting room, the walls are covered in even more puzzles between even more doors. A lush apple orchard at sunset. A wooden boat on the sea. A lion lounging in the sun. As I pass more doors, I graze my fingertips across the thin wooden frame of one illustrating a mother holding an infant and I once again find myself forcing away memories from my youth as I rip my hand back.

“Thank you so much for coming over” I hear my mother say from my room upstairs as she opens the front door. My stomach curdles as I hear the youth pastor greet her as he enters my home.

I should have known. I should have known better than to tell her he’s been hurting me, but I never thought she’d bring him here. It’s bad enough everything happening at church but now he is here? I tune out the small talk they fall into as I make eye contact with Doctor Waddles. The stuffed duck just smiles at me, and I wish I could return the expression.

“So DeeDee has told me some very interesting things and I just want to get your side of the story” she says to him as I hear the chairs move in what must be the dining room.

“I'm afraid I don’t know what you’re referring to.” he says, and the ease in his voice makes me frown. He is too good of a liar for this.

She tries to beat around the bush for a few minutes and he asks questions that truly make him seem clueless.

“Okay I’m just going to come out and say it; have you been touching my daughter?” she asks, and I can already tell based on her tone that she is going to believe whatever he says.

“I would never. You know me. You know my relationship with the Lord. She told you that?” he responds, and I have to admit he is pretty convincing.

“I think she is just going through a phase right now, you know how hard the divorce has been on her. I know you wouldn’t but I at least had to ask. What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t” she says with a small laugh and I hate to think about the kind of mother she is. I hate her.

“Would it be okay if I talked to her?” he asks and my heart stops. Surely she will say no. She has to say no. She doesn’t say no.

“Of course, she is up in her room. Go on up, I’m going to start making dinner. Would you like to join us?” I hear her reply, and I wish I was surprised.

“That would be lovely” he responds, and his chair scrapes against the tile as he rises. As soon as I hear his foot on the first step, I bolt off my bed and throw Doctor Waddles in the closet. He shouldn’t have to see this.

Opening these long sealed boxes feels like being burned and I have no idea why my unconscious mind decided now is the time to get a masochistic streak.

The woman finally stops at a door and opens it, gesturing for me to go through before her and I oblige. The couch and single plush chair in the room give it the atmosphere of a therapist’s office, so I decide to take the couch. There is only one puzzle displayed in here, but it takes up almost the entire wall across from me. I think my brain just hates me. That is the only explanation for why I am staring at an almost exact replica of my childhood bedroom pieced together and framed.

“My name is Ariel, and I am really sorry to inform you-”

“I’m dead. Yeah I know.” I snap, not caring that cutting her off could be considered rude. She is not real. I won’t be real soon. Time needs to move faster, I’m done with this. It takes effort to move my eyes away from the puzzle but I have to because I’ll be damned if that is the last thing I ever see. I force them to land on Ariel who has taken the seat in front of me, and her expectant smile for me to continue grates on me.

“Okay look I don’t want to do this. I just need to get through the rest of the seven minutes, so my deepest apologies to my mind for discarding it’s creative masterpiece, but I am going to take a nap until this is all over.”

I close my eyes and ignore her small laugh at my outburst. I don’t care that she’s laughing. She’s not even a person. It’s all a figment of my imagination and I guess at my core I am more self destructive than I previously thought.

“Do you want me to set a timer for seven minutes to show you the afterlife is real? Because I can sit here all day if I need to but I would like to give you the spiel sooner rather than later.”

I crack open my eyes and scowl at her self righteous grin.

“Although being quiet has never been my strong suit. Maybe I’ll sing. I’ve been told I am not very good, but maybe you’ll disagree. Any reques-”

“Fine. Start the timer.” I decided to give in for the sole reason of having an excuse to sit in silence for a definite amount of time, but I start to regret it as it means my thoughts have room to fill the echochamber.

I know it’s not real. It can’t be real. It’ll hurt too much if it is real. I look at the frilly pink prison cell framed on the wall where I decided god didn’t exist. As I scan it, I can feel the fuzzy rug on my knees as I said my goodbyes, and suddenly I am thirteen again.

“In the name of the father, son, and the holy spirit”. I form the sign of the cross as I say the words, and praying out loud is uncomfortable but I must. It’s not enough to think it, I have to say it. I take a deep breath and begin.

“I believed in you. With everything I had I believed in you. I thought you must exist. I needed you to exist. You had to exist because I needed to hold you accountable. But I can’t live like this anymore. I can’t live with the knowledge that if you’re there you don’t love me. I did everything I was supposed to. I told the truth. I promise it was the truth. But it didn’t matter. So if you’re there, and you do love me, that’s a really fucked up version of love, and I want no part in it.”

I wipe the tears from my face, do the sign of the cross for the last time, and crawl between the sheets of my twin bed. It’s finished.

“It’s been seven minutes.” Ariel says softly, as if not to spook a wounded animal, and I realize I am crying. I don’t cry in front of people. I will never forgive my brain for using its last burst of energy to humiliate me in front of an imaginary person.

“You’re dead. But it’s okay. God is real. Heaven is real. Paradise is real. You can go soon. We just need to go over your life first, so you can move on and be satisfied.”

“No.” I say quietly and she furrows her brows with obvious confusion, and I don’t feel like explaining. So I am not going to. It’s almost over. I am not going to talk about my life.

“I know it is hard to come to terms with but I am afraid you can’t go back down to Earth, your life has ended.” she says and I laugh through the emptiness flooding me.

“You obviously didn’t read the file then. I do not want to go back down to Earth. But I do not want to go to heaven either. I know this isn’t real but on the off chance that it is, send me to hell.”

“It doesn’t work like that, God loves you and wants you to have eternal joy. So let’s just start at the beginning and then we can go.”

“Well what if I don’t love God? I thought I had free will. So let me go to hell. I don’t want to be anywhere near that monster.” I spew, and the tears are back.

“Monster?”

“Yes, monster. The God I knew was a monster. A cruel bystander, catalyst, and weapon in my life and I want nothing to do with him.”

I hate being an angry crier. I am not sad, I am angry. I am on fire with rage, and I will set everything in my way ablaze, starting with that vile puzzle taunting me.

“We know very different Gods then. So let’s change that” she replies before standing and walking out the door.

I think back to what I said that day 27 years ago. That I needed to hold him accountable. So for the version of me who needed that desperately, I force myself to rise from the couch to follow her, and I repeat it like a mantra as I trail her through the hallway. I keep my eyes straight as we walk, not wanting to risk seeing a more specific puzzle.

They said everything happens for a reason. That everything is a part of God’s plan. I will tell him that his plan is unforgivable and I will tell him that no matter what the reason is, it’s not good enough. Maybe that’s why my brain crafted this. Maybe it thought I needed closure.

These thoughts pulse through me, a steady thrum through my bloodstream, when Ariel opens a door and I storm through it, words poised to fly off my tongue.

But I pause as I am met with the sight of a young girl sitting with her legs crossed on the floor, working on a puzzle. She can’t be more than six years old, and when she raises her eyes to me and smiles broadly, I take a step back.

“Hi DeeDee!” she says and jumps up, dusting off her pale blue dress, and the use of the nickname only my mother used has me back on the offensive.

“Do not call me that.” I snap, and I almost feel bad for the way she recoils at my volume. But she is not an innocent child. She knows what that name means. She knows what that woman did to me.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.” she says, looking down and my instinct is to comfort her. This angers me more. How manipulative does an entity have to be to appear as someone they know I will want to go easy on? I remind myself though, that she is not real. This is what my brain thinks I need in order to let go, so I reel myself in to see where this goes.

“Do you want to help me with my puzzle?” she asks, tugging at her long brown hair. I really don’t want to go near her, but she almost appears nervous that I will reject her. I think back to how much it hurt me when I was her age to have people say no to me, so I take my brain’s offer to heal my inner child or whatever it’s motive is and nod as I walk over to her and the puzzle.

“I don’t know what it is yet but the border is almost done!” she says as she grabs my hand and pulls me to sit down next to her. Her hand is so small in mine and I can feel the manipulation tactic working on me as I soften.

“So all the puzzles, you’re the one who puts them together?” I ask, scanning the room to see half started ones scattered across the floor. Luckily none of these are direct scenes from my life, but I do see depictions of rooms I’ve never been in and I wonder what the people who resided in those did to deserve a puzzle too.

“Mhmm, it’s how I destress after long days of God Work. Making everything is hard and humans make me sad sometimes. Jesus tries to explain to me that they don't know what they’re doing, but I tell them how to do everything they just won’t listen.”

I just blink at her as I take in her furrowed brows and pursed lips. The fact that she is pouting is ridiculous. She tries to place a piece but it doesn’t work and she lets out a sigh.

“I know you think I did nothing, but I told him to stop. I told him really loudly. I told your mommy too. He listened eventually but I could never get through to her. I yelled at her when she came to me though, don’t worry. I’m sorry it wasn’t enough.”

“I don’t buy it” I burst out. I don’t even mean to, it just happens, but it’s true. She wants to sit here and tell me she tried? She wants to sit here and try to get me to forgive her for something she’s not even sorry for? If she was sorry she would’ve saved me. If she was sorry she would have protected me in the first place. She just raises her eyes to me and frowns slightly.

“I’m not going to tell you that that hurts me because you already know how it feels” she says and I narrow my eyes at her.

“Are we not the same? Two pieces cut from the same cloth?” she offers softly, giving me a knowing look before looking back down at the puzzle.

“No we are not the same. You are infinitely more powerful than me” I try to keep the bite from my words, but it doesn’t work. She could have done more. She should have done more. I would have done more.

“Do not forsake your own divinity dear child” she says with a sad smile, and the irony of her calling me a child makes me snap.

“I am NOT a child. I had a beautiful house and a successful career. I am a grown woman.”

“Really? Because from where I'm sitting we both have always been just two little girls. Begging to be believed.”