Here I am … in one of those moods. You know the kind of mood where you start think­ing with­out being able to stop. Every­thing just seems to be made of ques­tions and every poten­tial answer – again – raises a bunch of ques­tions. As if that wouldn’t be enough, I keep hop­ping from thought to thought with high speed. The last time I expe­ri­enced an onslaught like this was more than two years ago. Well, back then these things hap­pened on a reg­u­lar basis. Now I don’t know how to han­dle it any more.

It sounds weird and most prob­a­bly, it is. I don’t know why that hap­pened ear­lier – even then it seemed to come out of the blue – and I don’t know why it stopped. I’m am a multi-tasking per­son and I tend to think on a few things simul­ta­ne­ously. Not that I could stop that if I wanted to, mind you. That pro­duces some … inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions when I sud­denly change the topic in mid-sentence with­out rec­og­niz­ing it. The only hint I ever get is the con­fused expres­sion on my dia­log partner’s face. Notic­ing such expres­sions is another mat­ter entirely.

Some­times, I’m not good at that at all. No, that’s not true. Most of the time I’m not good at it. But there are these rare moments when I seem to know oth­ers bet­ter than they do them­selves. When I was a youth it was com­pletely dif­fer­ent. Some time in life I must have taken the wrong path at the cross­roads. What­ever I did or didn’t, it has turned my life upside down. I’d like to say that this scares the shit out of me but I can’t find the emo­tion to back this state­ment up. It feels more like … some sort of sci­en­tific curiosity.

I’m not even emo­tion­ally crip­pled but rather … slightly out of phase. Out of touch with the real world with­out liv­ing in a world of my own cre­ation. Detached. Think­ing back on how or when this came to pass, I am unable to pin­point a pre­cise moment in time. No, this pecu­liar­ity has always been part of me but I didn’t know it for what it was. Edgar Allen Poe’s Alone comes to mind but in real­ity this goes deeper than the out­cast feel­ing as described in the poem. Any­way, I am quite cer­tain that my close encounter with death plays a role here. By all rights, I should have been dead – all I came away with was a bad concussion.

And the thrill. In this unbe­liev­ably long sec­ond where I rec­og­nized with cer­tainty that I was going to die some­thing hap­pened. I saw what most peo­ple refer to as the flash before their eyes. A life review. My take is that it def­i­nitely dif­fers from what Hol­ly­wood likes to show you. It is not like a movie. It’s rather a quick suc­ces­sion of impres­sions, like pic­tures, smells and thoughts. Together they form a pretty impres­sive and con­sis­tent con­struct of your life that tugs on the most vivid mem­o­ries and brings them to the fore­ground. I can’t really say what I felt at that moment because all of these mem­o­ries are con­nected to one feel­ing or the other so I might be best described as a vor­tex of feel­ings. They were there, yes, but more like a faint echo of the orig­i­nal emotion.

Apart from that I expe­ri­enced some­thing that can only be described as hyper­aware­ness. I felt like an over­clocked ver­sion of myself. Like my mind was work­ing at speeds I couldn’t even fathom before. I saw a fly stand­ing almost still in mid-air, its wings ever so slowly beat­ing the air. As if a fil­ter had been lifted from my eyes and I was able to see the world with dif­fer­ent eyes. I more felt than saw my own move­ment towards this sharp, rapier-like thing that was poised to hit me in the face. As fast as I was mov­ing my brain did all the nec­es­sary cal­cu­la­tions and prompted me with the – luck­ily wrong – answer: It’s gonna hit you right into the right eye and at the cur­rent speed it will dig deep into your brain, end­ing your life instantly – and you can do noth­ing about it.

In that pre­cise moment every­thing just slowed down. I saw the fly. I expe­ri­enced this life review. And then, some­thing really remark­able hap­pened. I felt … con­nected, more than ever before. I started to see my place, the con­nec­tions between me and the rest of the world. The way I influ­enced the peo­ple around me and the impact oth­ers had on me. A work­ing anal­ogy would be grav­ity dis­tort­ing space-time. A lot of things sud­denly began mak­ing sense. Answers to ques­tions asked long before appeared out of noth­ing­ness. It started as a trickle that soon became a stream of infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge, sur­round­ing me in ever smaller cir­cles, ready to crash into me.

I never, in my entire life, felt more alive than at this very moment. It didn’t mat­ter to me that I was going to die. Then came the pain. Funny thing because I actu­ally saw it. It started out as a dis­tant star that sud­denly went super­nova, wip­ing away all the wis­dom sur­round­ing me. I knew then that the spike had con­nected with my face. Next thing I remem­ber, I was lying on the floor and my head hurt like hell. That damn spike had hit my outer eye socket (sorry, I’m not good at anatomy). I started to weep. Not because of the pain but because of what I had lost. I wasn’t con­nected anymore.

Ever since then I knew that some­thing was dif­fer­ent. The world had become a much duller place to live in. I couldn’t read peo­ple eas­ily any­more. I had trou­ble to fall asleep for years. No mat­ter what I learned it couldn’t quench my thirst for knowl­edge. I felt used and bro­ken. I couldn’t come to terms with what I had seem­ingly lost. And, to my utter hor­ror, I real­ized that I had lost the abil­ity to suck up knowl­edge. It had always come eas­ily to me stor­ing infor­ma­tion in my brain. That was the worst blow of them all.

Now, a lit­tle more than seven years later, I’m sit­ting here writ­ing about it, unable to con­nect with my for­mer self. More refined but still detached. Colder. Older. Unable to con­sol­i­date what’s going on in my mind. Filled to the brim with ques­tions with­out answer. Moody. Filled with long­ing for some­thing I can never have. Isn’t it ironic that I should feel so strongly about this one thing and this one thing only with­out ever feel­ing sorry for myself? This isn’t pity. This … is life.