After Ethan took the final breath, marking the end of his human experience, his world went dark, and he experienced the sensation of weightlessness.
He couldn't see, but it felt as though the concept of sight didn't exist for him at all. It was peculiar, as if his mind had told him that it was perfectly natural that he couldn't see. In fact, it felt perfectly natural that he didn't have any of his five senses.
Ethan tried to make sense of his new circumstances but found his mind sluggish, as if it was exhausted and struggling to stay awake. The drowsy sensation grew in intensity, and he began to panic.
Ethan knew he had likely died, so he tried to recall religious stories about the afterlife from around the world—anything to help explain what was happening to him and what he should do next, but he struggled to remember a single detail.
It felt as though the memories were right before him, but they disappeared like a mirage when he reached out for them. He tried to recall the events that led him to this place but found himself struggling to do so as if he were in a dream. It was as if he had always existed in this place where senses and memories do not exist.
Suddenly, it dawned on him. Like the souls of the damned drinking from the river Lethe, he was forgetting everything that made him, him—forgetting everything he had experienced throughout his short life.
Worst of all was the comforting sensation that came with forgetting. It felt as if a gentle voice was whispering into his ear, lulling him to leave everything behind and rest eternally. Like a siren song wooing sailors to their doom, the sensation of losing himself was wooing Ethan toward his own. All he had to do was give in, and the bliss of nihility would be his...
However, as the last of Ethan's faculties succumbed to the siren's song, a jolt of searing pain assailed his consciousness. It started as a feeling of warmth, but as the moments passed, it increased in intensity until it felt like his consciousness had been doused in gasoline and lit ablaze.
Ethan wasn't sure how much time had passed as he experienced the agony of this new hell he found himself in. Each time he felt he was getting used to the pain, it would increase once more and keep him from having a moment's respite. As he struggled to endure, he suddenly heard a woman's shout, and the pain vanished as quickly as it had arrived.
The woman's voice began as quiet as a whisper, but it rapidly increased in volume as if she had instantly closed the distance between them. It made him feel unsettled, as if the shout had come from some sort of horror movie or a nightmare.
As his mind acclimated, more noises could be heard. He thought it sounded like an emergency room of some kind. He could hear the sounds of people shuffling about as other voices appeared to join in on the shouting.
He was sure that he had died. He was no doctor, but the car was going far too fast for it to not have ended up as a mangled scrap of steel and carbon fiber on the side of the road.
If by some miracle he had survived, he wasn't sure he'd want to wake up. He'd be beyond lucky if his body wasn't paralyzed or worse. The thought of being a prisoner in his own body horrified him beyond words.
However, that horror paled in comparison to the sheer terror he had experienced when he felt his ego and memories slipping away earlier. If that was what the afterlife had in store, he'd gladly take a broken body over death any day. At least he'd still be himself.
A few moments after Ethan began to hear noises, his vision grew brighter. He began to feel his body, too, but he felt restricted as if wrapped tightly in blankets.
Opening his eyes, Ethan only saw a blob of gray before a bright white background. The gray blob moved closer to him, and his vision became clearer as it did. It was a woman's face, one that he didn't recognize.
The woman appeared middle-aged and had large green eyes capped with crowfeet. Her face was thin, and she wore a white bandana over her long, graying brown hair.
She reminded him of a particular school teacher who always found trouble with him in second grade. Perhaps her similarity to his old school teacher created a bias in his mind, but she looked uncaring and mean to him.
The woman frowned as her eyes met his. "Kertsa magalmun ba kekin borras ka?" She muttered as she turned her head to look elsewhere in the room.
Ethan couldn't understand what the woman said. She looked European, but her words didn't sound like any language he had heard before. As a result, he began to question whether he had suffered some sort of brain damage from the accident.
After more voices replied with yet more gibberish, the woman turned her gaze back to Ethan and reached out toward him. As the woman's hand reached him, she began to fumble about with something on his chest. As a result, he felt less restrained.
A moment later, Ethan felt the woman's hand on his arm as she lifted it up and appeared to scan it with her eyes. Ethan didn't care about her strange actions because, at that moment, he was just happy that he could feel at all.
Now that he knew he wasn't paralyzed, he tried lifting his head to check on the state of his body but found himself unable to lift it more than a few inches. However, what little he could see left him in a state of shock.
Ethan saw a pudgy little arm within the woman's grasp. He clearly felt her hand on his arm, but he refused to believe what his eyes were showing him. Because if he did, that would mean that the infant arm within his vision belonged to none other than himself.
Ethan attempted to clench his fist when the tiny little hand before him balled into a fist in response. He tried it again, but the scene played out the same. He struggled with all his strength to lift his head even an inch higher, but struggle as he might, it made no difference.
Unable to see anything more, he relaxed his weak neck and let his head fall back onto the bed as he stared blankly toward the ceiling. His mind raced as he tried to rationalize what he saw, but according to Occam's Razor, the simplest answer was often the correct one.
The simplest answer for an infant's arm responding to his thoughts was that he was inhabiting the body of an infant. He was now sure he had died, which, considering the extent of his car accident, wasn't a surprise to him.
He had been reborn for whatever reason, yet he still retained his memories of his life as Ethan. He was no stranger to the reincarnation trope found in many fantasy novels, but reading a story and experiencing it himself were two very different things.
He began scanning the woman over, looking for any new information he could glean from her, but it was futile. An infant's eyesight was atrocious, and he could only see a few feet in front of him.
As he attempted to turn his head and look at his surroundings, she quickly rewrapped the blanket around him, restricting his movement once more. She then turned her head and spoke some more gibberish to someone else in the room.
Another woman's voice shouted in response, causing the middle-aged woman to glare at Ethan and scoff before moving out of his vision range. He wasn't sure what was happening, but a younger woman's face soon appeared above him. She seemed to be in her late teens, with curly blonde hair sticking out from the sides of her white bandanna.
The new woman glanced over her shoulder and struggled to hold back tears before steeling her resolve and picking him up. She held him tightly as she walked, seemingly with a destination in mind. Now that he had a better look at her, she had kind blue eyes and gave him a sort of friendly-girl-next-door vibe.
She smiled after noticing his gaze. "Hyon balla ji gyanna? Hyon balla ji gyanna?"
They hadn't walked for very long before she stopped and knocked on a door. When the door opened, Ethan tried to turn his head to see what was happening, but the kind-eyed lady seemed to think he was trying to get away and tightened her grip so he wouldn't fall.
The kind-eyed lady spoke with the woman who opened the door for a minute with varying degrees of sadness in her eyes as she seemingly recounted a story. After the story concluded, Ethan was handed off to this new woman.
"Benna benna, Arutar!" The kind-eyed lady said with a baby voice as she waved her hand.
After she waved goodbye, Ethan was brought inside a dimly lit room. 'Does 'benna benna' mean goodbye?' he wondered. He wasn't feeling too excited at the prospect of learning a new language, but it appeared he wouldn't have a say in the matter.
Ethan couldn't really get a good look at this newest woman as her face was too far from his position on her lap, but what he did see forced his heart to drop.
'Oh—nonono!' Ethan cried out within his mind as the woman unbuttoned her blouse. Obviously, a baby needed to eat. But his mind had been so cluttered that he hadn't even considered this problem.
'Wait! Let's talk about this! Hey, don't push my head! Hey! Sto—' Ethan pleaded in his thoughts. However, in the end, it was futile.