My Mom Keeps Setting Me a Plate; I Died 15 Years Ago

The last thing I remembered was blinding lights as the high beams of a semi truck came barreling closer and closer. I had fallen asleep at the wheel, and my exhausted ignorance cost me my life.

I didn’t know I was dead at first. After the blackness that followed the initial impact, the next thing I remembered was being in the hospital. Not in a hospital bed or anything, just in the hospital.

My mom was there. I saw her crying, a heaving mess as her body fell across what I soon realized was…me.

I could see myself lying there, bruised and bloodied. My entire body was bandaged and hardly recognizable, and my mother wailed a thousand screams as my dad and brother tried desperately to console her; tears streaking their faces.

For hours, I watched as my family grieved over my body. I watched as doctors came and announced that I had to be taken away, and the sheer agony that gripped the entire room as, one by one, my family made their last goodbyes.

Following them to the exit, as they walked through the doors into the outside world, I walked through the doors directly into my own funeral; My casket displayed in front of all my closest friends and loved ones.

Of all the attendees, my mother undoubtedly took it the worst. Her hands shook, and her knees wobbled as my dad led her to the front pew. Her cries of desperation and grief acted as a backdrop to the preacher's sermon on love and acceptance.

I was then transported to the place of my burial, where all of those friends and loved ones gathered to see me put to rest eternally.

The sky lingered as a dark, inky blackness, and the first drops of rain began to fall. Soon, the ground was being pelted with millions of stinging raindrops as the sky blazed with lightning. I watched as my loved ones parted one by one, escaping the unforgiving weather. It finally came down to my mother, father, and brother.

My father begged my mother to come out of the rain, but she flat-out refused. Glued to the ground, her eyes raw and red. Lightning struck the ground a mere 50 feet from the gravesite, and I watched as my father forced my mother to her feet before dragging her to the car as she kicked and flailed.

The gravediggers began shoveling dirt into the hole, and I was knocked to my back as black mud started to paint my face. With each scoop thrown into my grave, my vision became more and more obscured until, finally, darkness.

All light from the outside world had turned into a sprawling black void that suffocated me. I struggled to move but remained locked in one place, completely motionless. I opened my mouth to scream and became utterly petrified to realize no air escaped my lungs as I lay there gasping.

In the blackness, whispers came. They were so deafening that it was as though they crawled into my eardrum by the millions, reminding me of my hopelessness.

Time did not exist in this darkness. I simply was.

I stayed there, on the verge of suffocation, for 12 years. 12 long, insufferable years, In the grand scheme of things, though, those 12 years are nothing. A weekend trip to the beach. A math class. A trip to the bathroom. That’s what those 12 years were.

However, in year 13, something different happened.

The whispering that consumed my mind was replaced with the sounds of my family. The sound of my mother and father's marriage breaking down. The sound of the countless fights, my brother's cries, my father's drunken tirades. It all came flooding in seemingly out of nowhere before a bright screen appeared in front of me, vanquishing the darkness.

It showed my home. Empty and silent. It panned around the entirety of the home, showing my father as he packed his things, leaving my mother. It showed as my mother cried, night after night, alone in her bed. However, the most daunting image it showed me was that of my brother, hanging from his ceiling fan; his feet dangling lifeless.

How could I be so sick being nothing? I wanted to cry, but no tears would come. I wanted to scream, but no sound escaped.

I was shown the sheer devastation that rocked what remained of my mom after the death of her last remaining son, and the absolute grief that gripped her once more.

And that’s when the screen disappeared, and blackness returned.

It returns every single night, at 6 o'clock sharp, revealing images of my mother setting the table; Preparing a hot plate for my brother and me. Tears in her eyes every time.

I don’t know if this is divine punishment, I don’t know what this is.

All I know is I love you, mom. I love you