I woke up from my dream in a cold sweat. "You only have twenty-four hours to live" echoed in my ears. I shook it off, dismissed it as a nightmare, and got ready for school. Although most dreams fade away several minutes after waking up, mine popped back in my head every other second. It haunted me when I was getting dressed - What will I wear on my last day? What will I be buried in? It followed me to the kitchen when I ate breakfast - I wonder if this is my last meal. And it left the house with me - Is this the last time I'll walk through this door?
I shook my head. I had to get rid of these ridiculous thoughts. I was not going to die. Not today. But your clock is ticking; a voice spoke up from the back of my head. You only have twenty-three hours left. I pushed that thought into the deepest part of my mind. I had to focus today. I had important classes ahead of me, and nothing was going to stop me from dominating the grades.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't shake the voice. As the hours flew by, the voice from my nightmare slowly became my voice. Before I knew it, "you have twenty-four hours to live" turned into "I have twenty-four hours to live".
I was a stone statue, unmoving, my eyes fixed on the work placed before me in all my classes that day. I did not lift my pencil, not even a finger to find the value of x in an algebraic equation, nor write a timed essay, nor take notes on the lecture in History, or even fill in data for Chemistry. Teacher's voices became white noise, fading into the background. They meant nothing to me. There was no room in the capacity of my mind left for school work and lectures, because the realization I had come to was a life- changing epiphany that was too big to fathom. I had realized and come to accept that if I really did only have twenty-four hours left, my existence would be absolutely useless and I had been wasting my time for fifteen years.
I became completely entrenched in my thoughts of the meaning of life, the meaning of my life specifically, and how I was to move forward in my final hours with this newfound knowledge.
Perhaps I don't die today, a thought emerged in my tumultuous mind. It's simply been a test, to allow me to come to this realization.
I left school triumphant that day. I had accomplished nothing in the precious hours I had been there, yet I had accomplished everything that mattered. In the excitement of discovery, I ran across to the location where I'd meet my mother. In that moment, when I placed my foot on the street, I had made a grave mistake. I had failed to even glance one way before crossing the street. The honks of the car reached my ears too late. Due to my failure of checking the street, I had crossed to the other side - not of the street, but of Life and Death.
All my realizations and newfound discoveries of the meaning of life were fleeting, and now absolutely meaningless to me. In my last minutes, I truly learned that the meaning of life was...