介绍： 前期录制：Zoe
后期剪辑：鱼翅
校对：月饼
内容来源：《忽然七日》英文版节选

Before I Fall
The moment of death is full of heat and sound and pain bigger than anything, a funnel of burning heat splitting me in two, something searing and scorching and tearing, and if screaming were a feeling it would be this. Then...

介绍： 前期录制：Zoe
后期剪辑：鱼翅
校对：月饼
内容来源：《忽然七日》英文版节选

Before I Fall
The moment of death is full of heat and sound and pain bigger than anything, a funnel of burning heat splitting me in two, something searing and scorching and tearing, and if screaming were a feeling it would be this. Then nothing.
I used to think that’s what love was: knowing someone so well he was like a part of you.
I’m dead, but I can’t stop living. The absurdity of everything really hits me in that second and I start laughing again.
You see, I was still looking for answers then. I still wanted to know why. As though somebody was going to answer that for me, as though any answer would be satisfying. Not then, but afterward, I started to think about time, and how it keeps moving and draining and flowing forever forward, seconds into minutes into days into years, all of it leading to the same place, a current running forever in one direction. And we’re all going and swimming as fast as we can, helping it along. My point is: maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there’s a tomorrow. Maybe for you there’s one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around in it, let it slide like coins through your fingers. So much time you can waste it. But for some of us there’s only today. And the truth is, you never really know.
As I lie there I start making a mental list of all the things I’d like to do in my life, as though they’re still possible. Most of them are just plain crazy, but I don’t think about that, just go on listing and listing like it’s as easy as writing up what you need from the grocery store. Fly in a private jet. Eat a fresh-baked croissant from a bakery in Paris. Ride a horse all the way from Connecticut to California but stay in only the best hotel rooms along the way. Some of them are simpler: take Izzy to Goose Point, a place I discovered the first and only time I’d ever tried to run away. Order the Fat Feast at the diner—a bacon cheese-burger, a milk shake, and an entire plate of cheese fries—and eat it without stressing, like I used to do on my birthday every single year. Run around in the rain. Have scrambled eggs in bed.
Things change after you die, though—I guess because dying is about the loneliest thing you can do.
There’s no continuity in people at all. Like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you’re no longer a kid but a “young adult,” and after that you’re a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one.
Here are the basic two rules of running away successfully: 1. Go somewhere you know. 2. Go somewhere nobody else knows.
Up until then it’s a good day—one of the best. Close to perfect, even though nothing special happened at all. I guess I’ve probably had a lot of days like this, but somehow they’re never the ones you remember. That seems wrong to me now.
Everything looks so stupidly, happily normal: everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who’s with who and did you hear.
It feels like I’ve reached back in time and corrected something. I haven’t felt so alive, so capable of doing things.
You and me. Everything was awful except for this.
They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that’s not how it happens for me.