Death is only the beginning

I saw a man. He wandered through my dreams. Like a ghost he haunted me. Every dream he was there like an empty shell of existance. Expressionless, in his tattered suit just staring at me. I tried to control my dreams to do whatever must be done to be rid of him. But to no evail. He was always there. 

One day after nights of no sleep I saw him, not in my dream but standing before me, the reflection in the mirror. I thought I was loosing it. Every window that bore a reflection there he was. Every mirror he stood staring. I tried to ignore it, it was just my lack of sleep. 

Months have gone bye an I'm starting to forget what I look like. All I see is him. Emotion is leaving me. I'm becoming a vacant shell of a man that once was. A cold desolate existance of a life without feeling. Coldness surrounds me like the abyss of hell.

Daily routine is all I know now. Though I feel nothing. No love, no joy, no sorrow, no pain. Strange, I've forgotten who I am or how I came to be.

Then one day I stood before the mirror an what I saw brought chills to the depths of my miserable soul. I saw no man, just the rotting corpse of a man that once was. Maggots eating away, the flesh gone. I saw me. 

I had been dead along time, taken my own life in an act of rage. I had given up on life an love, the simple pleasures  and had gone mad. This was my forever torment, Satan playing a cruel joke. Forever to repeat my last days, forever to be taunted by the man in my dreams who all along was really just a man who couldn't live an love, a man who was really just a reflection of me. If only I could have lived, if only I could have loved. Death, is only the beginning.....

By Matthew branton