“WHAT WAS your past experience like?”
“Where do you see yourself going?”
They were all simple questions; questions that were routine, he thought, as he cast a glance backwards to the intern being drilled for a vacancy that had opened up. Questions he could have answered, and did answer, before but if posed with them now, he realized, would be the most difficult things that would ever demand his focus.
But then again, posed with any question right now would probably be a task that would seem ten times grander that it really was.
“My heart feels heavy… and dark fills my soul.”
The simple words resounded in his memory; words he had penned one evening, years ago, while feeling overwhelmed by nearly everything that surrounded his existence.
Words he had acted on, actions he hoped to forget with time, but as time would prove, he was beginning to see that some things were not to be forgotten.
Never to be forgotten.
He came across the words, printed in an old note book, exactly seven days ago and ever since, they were unwilling to leave him. Or maybe, he was unwilling to let them go.
To the world, there was nothing wrong and all was well. All seemed right and promising for 29-year-old Neil Drake.
He was a successful senior manager at an advertising firm, ‘Impressions’, and had a future that seemed destined to go nowhere else but up.
Still, despite all this, there was something… something that was missing, since he was plunged into his reverie. Something was different from the usual affect he presented to the world. 
“My heart feels heavy… and dark fills my soul.”
The words echoed in his mind again.
Decidedly, he reminded himself that his life was not void of love or the joy of seeing a child, his child, grow up.
Though he had never married, Neil had fathered a child with his high school sweetheart, Melanie Summers.
His three-year-old little princess, Nessie, was the pride of his life and he breathed relief that, at least, that was not the problem.
But, as if he had the air punched out of him, Neil gasped as soon as the reality of a ‘present’ problem hit him.
Glumly, with a forced smile pasted on his face, he made his way into his corner office and thought about the misty, murky horizon that faced him.
“My heart feels heavy… and dark fills my soul.”
The thought stayed with him all day.
At home in his posh Republic Avenue apartment, he embraced the solace of silence that filled the entire house.
Nessie was with her mother, and wouldn’t be coming until the end of the week. So, he was alone.
Alone!
The concept was startling to him now since his unbidden contemplations began.  Lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, he sighed… a tired sigh.
It seemed what was once an asset, his overly active imagination, was becoming something of an affliction.
His world was going topsy-turvy again, and reenacting past actions seemed more and more inviting.
“I will not let this get to me!” he shouted at the walls, arms raised in frustration.
With that, he made his way to the bedroom, a few steps away. As he opened his medicine cabinet, his hands ran wildly across the shelves, searching for the sleeping pills he knew he had somewhere.
“Damn-it! Where are those stupid pills!” Neil mumbled.
It was as if he was not meant to find it.
“Hmm!” he sighed and resolved to make the trip to the 24/7 general store a few corners from his apartment.
Throwing a shirt on, he made his way down, and his troubled reflections went with him.
“I really need those sleeping pills,” he affirmed aloud as he stepped out into the street.
Screech… BLAM!!!
My heart feels heavy… and dark fills my soul…….
He saw the lights but too late. The car hit him before he could ever react. He felt himself losing hold of consciousness, losing his hold on life. But he was helpless. He could do nothing; he saw his life, all of it, and he remembered vividly his words and….his actions.
“My heart feels heavy… and dark fills my soul”
He remembered overdosing on the morphine his father, a doctor, kept in his office for emergencies and house calls.
To Neil, it was an emergency; he needed the painkiller to help him deal with the pain he felt. The anguish that engulfed him as his existence became overwhelmed by near everything that surrounded his world.
The morphine caused his breathing to stop, and death was coming, but the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and the antidote his father injected brought him back.
He remembered slipping like he was now, but his father had been able to pull him back. It was something he was never going to forget.
But maybe, just maybe, thinking about reenacting his past actions to deal with what had become his life had been enough to herald the Death Angel’s arrival.
Maybe the mere thought of inviting death was enough for IT to knock at one’s door. Maybe the thought was enough to validate the INADVERTENT INVITATION.
Just maybe…
Neil flat-lined about three minutes later.
The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter and one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.  ~Virginia Woolf