keyword: collage, title: extraction in misc. flash fiction

They say when you’re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes and while that’s kind of what it’s like, they’re not quite right. Flashing before your eyes describes a strict linear order, a narrative with defined beginnings, ends and borders. Whether really the edges of the heavens or an oxygen-starving nervous system’s mirage, when you’re on the edge of life, less like the light flashing burning bright in the forest of your final night, it’s more like a collage.

This life’s like a film on celluloid, you see, the flickering through twenty-four frames a second makes it look as you have previously reckoned but your total life review is at its core not just everything that came before it on fast forward. Imagine all your reels chopped up willy-nilly instead and all dumped at once on your damned head. That’s what it feels like on the edge of good night. I’ve been there once, in the white-hot room, when they messed up the anesthetics before pulling out my wisdom teeth. I’ve been there once, the light and that heat. It’s not at all about the front-to-back procession of time, it’s rather aligned by all of the events that rhymed.

You see her walking out the door again and then right up behind you she comes up fifteen years younger for your first kiss together. You are wrinkled and hairless and old, you are wrinkled and hairless and newborn, the two sides of the horseshoe come together again, in that collage, in the end. The dog you had as a child, the dog you had as a man, they laminate into a composite thing as they bore out the same meaning to you, then spilt off to chase separate sticks. It is the whole damned show folded over on itself, not a neat beginning to end or faded pictures on the shelf.

A torrent of double-exposures, as back when we still used chemical film to capture the flashes of our lives not pixels trapped in binary code as if scarabs preserved in amber or chicken suspended in aspic gel, layers on layers on layers all at once, blending and sending, without beginning and without ending. It’s not your life or anyway it isn’t just your life, bouncing off the walls of a funhouse mirror cage, remixed, transfixed, memetically mutated, serrated, conflated.

Everyone you’ve been, could’ve been, couldn’t be no matter how much you wanted it, there in a blender and God or biology or consciousness or whatever is pulsing you up from whip to frappe, you’re yourself, you’re the walls, you’re the air you’re breathing, blinding bleeding, you’re left to decide: can I live with this?

These disjointed echoes seen not as a man sees in a straight line but as the universe sees, splayed out over time. Can I live with all the things that I’ve been? The last time around, I decided that I can, but I don’t know what I’ll say yet whenever it happens again.