All I had wanted was to see my wife again. All I had wanted was to watch her lips curve up in a gentle smile, feel her soft touch, hold her in my arms one last time.

My wife had been stolen from me two years ago, and I had been searching for her ever since. They called me crazy, they called me ill - but I had finally found her.

Or rather, a doorway to her.

Most people would never dare to cross between realms. They would argue that such journeys are better left to discontent spirits and mystical species. I didn't care about whether or not I should. I knew only that I could, and that I would.

I won't tell you how I did it. I don't want you making the same mistakes I did. But I will tell you one thing: the doorway to the realm of the dead is open for only a few nights a year, and then for only a few hours on those nights.

I had gotten so caught up in finding my wife, so desperate as the minutes clicked by...

...that I didn't leave in time. I didn't even realize until it was much, much too late.

I was trapped in the afterlife.

I had nothing else to do - I kept searching for my wife. I was more leisurely about it now, more relaxed - I had spent two years without her and now I was stuck until the doorway opened again. I had plenty of time.

I underestimated how many dead people there were.

It would have helped if they were organized by any sort of description. Ethnicity, nationality, even something benign like height or hair color. But no. I passed a 17th-century sailor conversing pleasantly with a World War II soldier. A medieval-times peasant woman was curled next to a modern-day businessman. There was no rhyme or reason to the placement of these souls, and from the few questions I had dared to ask the friendlier-looking deceased, there was no set entrance point, either.

My wife could be anywhere and I would not know.

In this land, I had no need for food or drink. Nor sleep, for that matter, although sometimes I forced myself into unconsciousness just to get a break from my tiring search.

Some part of me, deep down, knew I would never find her. Another part of me knew I would never escape.

So I forged alliances, just as everyone around me had done. I befriended an ancient member of the British royal family, a swashbuckling Spanish pirate from the 1700s, and a 1950s news anchor. They knew I was not like them, that I didn't belong in their realm, and they gave me a family all the same.

The time came, eventually - although I could hardly tell the passage of time in that empty, grey space - when the doorway back to Earth reopened. By then, I was almost gone. Not gone as in dead - one cannot die when they are already in the afterlife. Gone as in ghostlike, pale as a corpse and barely breathing. I was turning into one of them in a slow, near-invisible process.

My friends, my pseudo-family, they recognized the danger of this transformation. Humans are entitled to few things in this world but one of them is death, ugly or peaceful. If I did not get a normal death, there was no saying what sort of afterlife I would have.

They understood this, and they cared enough to hoist me up, drag me to the door, and plead with me to return to Earth. I tried to tell them that I hadn't found my wife, that I needed to find her - but they knew I never would.

"Someday," they said. "Someday you will find her."

And they threw me through the doorway.

I had been missing for the better part of a year. My life on Earth fell to shambles.

And all because I meddled with forces beyond my understanding.