"Beautiful..." he whispered to himself while gazing at the glistening stars above him. Mesmerized, Paul slowly strode along the unlit stone pathway with his head propped up at the sky and not paying attention to his surroundings. While listening to the rustling of the wind through leaves in the trees surrounding him, he was at peace. The night air lightly caressed his face, and he was drawn into another world. His own little world. At a distance, Paul heard screeching of tires but decided to ignore it. All he wanted to do at that moment was to knock on the sky and speak to each and every individual beautiful star. Every step he took, the screeching grew closer and closer, but Paul still chose to block out the sound and continue his slow meditation forward. Two funnels of light flashed before him and in the next instant, he was flying straight back from an impact, his body bent at a strange angle. The world went in slow motion in his mind's eye. As he flew backwards, his one functional eye caught a glimpse of a car that went off the side of the road. He saw blood flying back towards his direction in slow motion, and then...darkness.


Paul was rushed to the ER room. His conditions required immediate operation in order for his survival. He entered the emergency room with his eyes already slightly open and saw nothing but streaming lights and heard nothing but screaming people, and then his body finally gave out and his heavy eyelids closed shut making him fall into a long slumber of darkness.


Not soon after, Paul inched his eyes open but he had a strange feeling that he wasn't inside his own body. He was in a body form, but definitely was not the body that he woke up in the day before. Strange. Although he couldn't move his body, he was able to move his eyes. He looked around disoriented, but only darkness greeted his confusion. "Am I...dead?", he asked himself. "Is this it?... Is this the afterlife?", he continued. As his eyes came into focus and adapted to the darkness, a white, soft textured surface caught his vision. "What... is that?" A thought crossed his half awakened mind and slowly whirled into motion to begin his comprehension of his environment once more. He felt his body laying down parallel with the mysterious white substance surrounding him. Feeling entrapped and helpless, the darkness and cold finally started to cave in upon him. Then as time passed, slowly, his numbness lifted, like a cloth about to reveal the contents underneath, and he was finally able to move his stiff limbs. Trying to cut his way through the white opaque substance that surrounded him, he finally broke free. Freedom never felt so good. Like a butterfly, Paul slowly arose from his cocoon, and scanned the new welcoming area around him. The darkness slowly lifted and numerous showers of lights started to appear around him and dipped him in a bath of dancing flares. The location of his whereabouts was definitely not the hospital nor any place that he has been to before, but everything seemed way too familiar to him. He saw the same starry sky as he did on the day before the car accident, but everything seemed...bigger and closer. Paul wasn't looking at the stars from the perspective of Earth, but instead he was standing amongst the stars and literally just broke out of one himself. Paul saw oceans of stars in every direction he looked from top to bottom and tried to put all the pieces together. Although his mind was still hazy and refused to acknowledge the impossible, he concluded that he was light years away into space. "A dream?", he asked. "No.", he quickly said right after. “It's too real…”


Paul stepped out of his cocoon and created a Doppler effect underneath him. Like a pebble entering Stillwater, Paul walked forward. All of space, time, and science that he knew to be true were all thrown out the window because they didn't apply to him in that moment he was living. He walked towards the nearest star because he wanted to see how it really looked like with his very own two eyes. As he entered the aura of light that was being emitted by the star, he didn't see a giant sun like sphere in which he expected, but instead he saw something that looked very similar to the item he came out of not so long ago. Slowly walking up to it, the figure of the star subtly became clearer and clearer. It was indeed the same cocoon like shell that he came out of, but it wasn't him that was in the cocoon but instead it was a person that he has never met before, a human in fact. He questioned the still form, but silence greeted his words. Confused, and almost frightened, Paul sprinted out to go check on the other stars around him, but every star gave him the same answer. "What is this? Why are ordinary human beings in these white cocoon-like shells in the middle of an ocean of stars light years away from where they’re supposed to be?", he asked with fear flashing in his eyes. It was too unworldly and alien for Paul to comprehend. Unworldly. Unearthly. And silence swept through the space, piercing him in the chest from confusion and fear. "Where… Where am I?"

Paul sat down on the dark glassy surface that seemed like the ground, but it was not. Gathering his thoughts and trying to process the surplus of information he had just gained, Paul came to a realization. He was alive, but only for a little while longer. That bright flash and the screeching. The smell of burnt rubber stinging his nose as he blacked out. That was all reality. The evidence to the only true fact right now: that he was soon to be no longer a living person on Earth. As these thoughts raced through his mind, a glimmer of soft yellow shades begun to shine around him. Startled, Paul looked to his surroundings. And saw something that struck fascination and fear into his eyes, and kept him speechless.

His body was glowing. A soft golden like light. Well, if he could have touched the light, it would have felt like touching fluffy, slightly moist moss of a golden color. As he watched his skin dazzle in a warm glow, he noticed small spheres of the golden light begin to float away from him, in directly straight upward spirals. Like cherry blossom petals fluttering in the cool spring winds, these golden blobs of light collected off of Paul’s skin, clothes, hair, and every part of him that was existent in that space. As the glowing spheres gathering together around him, the shine of the light intensified and a bright flash of light steadily grew around him. He was back in the headlights of the car again, blinded. The screech of the brakes being pressed on as hard as possible. The pain he was unable to feel during the accident struck him once more, and then everything went black. Then, a burst of white noise cancelled out all the sounds of memory. The sound caused Paul to open his eyes again. And could not stretch them far open enough to take in all that he saw at that moment.

The world, spread out before him. Below him. Above him was the dark sky, dotted with light. Stars. Around him were more dots of light. Or were they dots? They looked more, how would he put it, "humanoid", in form. Surprising humanoid. Paul looked at the stars below him, next to him, and above him and cracked a little smile. A tear streamed down his left cheek soon after. Happy yet sad. Coming to his last couple of minutes of existence, the golden particles that were coming off of him increased in numbers which meant that his time has come to an end. “I’m blessed and gratefu--” But he was unable to finish his statement. Paul disappeared into the open space like a melting candle that finally put itself out with the hot wax, a wisp of smoke curling from the center. He had become a shower of star dust.
Back on Earth, Paul’s “Earth” body was still undergoing a long surgery process, but suddenly Paul’s heart rate dropped to an dangerously low bpm. Thump… … Thump… … It sounded as though his heart was falling into a slumber, its breathing getting slower and slower, softer and softer. On its trip to eternal deep sleep. A slow beat one after another, and finally his heart gave out. The monitor screeched a long beep, killing to the silence. A single, green, flat, straight line appeared on the screen. His heart was now at its journey’s end, having reached its final destination.
What Paul saw that night during his operation, was no dream. It was his death, in real time, but in his true other form. Although Paul’s assumptions were correct, he failed to realize that every person was indeed a star. Each and every one a beautiful one in their own right. Both Paul's existence on Earth and in space both disappeared simultaneously. A fall of a star. A starry sky with one less light.