There is a theory that after you die, your brain might still be active for a few minutes. Not really thinking in the way we know it, but still there. Existing. Maybe floating in a kind of dream state while your body shuts down.
When I heard that, it hit me harder than I expected.
Seven minutes. What would I replay?
Not the perfect answer where I say all the right things. The real answer.
Would my brain jump straight to the people who hurt me? Would it replay every fight I wish had gone differently? Would it hold on to the one person I never stopped loving? Would it replay the moments where I finally stood up for myself?
Would it be the quiet childhood scenes? The weird little memories nobody else even knows about? The time I felt seen for half a second? The day I realized I was on my own?
The idea broke me a little, because it forced a question I usually outrun.
If the last thing my brain did was rewatch my life, would I feel like I had lived as myself, or as a version of me that was edited to keep everyone else comfortable?
We spend so much time trying to survive, fix, explain, defend, and patch things. Sometimes we forget that the only person who will be inside our head at the very end is us.
Not the people we tried to impress. Not the people who misunderstood us. Not the ones who got a twisted version of the story and never asked for more.
Just us and whatever we chose to hold on to.
That thought hurts, but it is also a map.
If there is even a small chance that my brain will spend its last minutes replaying something, I want to start choosing different scenes now. Not fake happy moments. Real ones.
The times I told the truth even when my voice shook.
The day I walked away from people who loved my dysfunction more than my healing.
The moment I looked at myself and thought, "I like you, actually."
If I am going to replay something, I want it to be proof that I finally lived as me.
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