They say the brain stays alive for ten seconds after you die. What is time but a matryoshka eternity, nestling the division of moments?

They say when you die, you relive your life, only what they don’t tell you it is like bungee jumping. At the apogee of your life, the memories run taut, thrumming, then reel backwards.

Your memories, a shuffle of slowly translucent photographs into the mists of brain death; you never knew what you lost, and only live to exist in the moment.

O’Riley flickering into code, then being cauterized into two by Covenant plasma bursts under a strange sky, the weariness of a necessary war, the thrill of the first drop, the fatigue of training with only his sister’s smile across the ranks holding him up, the excitement of the siblings signing up for glory and honor oh what little they knew, then they were children running across the pasture where the dandelion flew off like reverse snowflakes, the murmur of adults, soft noises, myopia, then an all encompassing warmth.