Wherever Dead Was....by Kim Sirrah

There was a time I thought life was as simple as opening your eyes every morning while breathing in and out. Or maybe it was the billions of thoughts crossing my mind consciously and unconsciously everyday like a continuing circle, with no beginning, and no end. I know now that there is nothing simple about life. My name is Mia Anderson I am sixteen years old; and I ask myself this query because I've been to the other side, for lack of a better discription. I died...so they tell me. If it was death, I can most definitely testify death is not the end; because wherever dead was, there was life, and I too was very much alive.

My story has no ending as I continue my quest to reconnect with the place I encountered on the other side,in another world, or maybe it was this world. I don't know, but I yearn to get back to wherever it was that I was transported to when my heart stopped in this world.

It was so beautiful, so magically intoxicating this paradox, and impossible to discribe the transforming effect this place had on my body and my mind; I could only comprehend that I was no longer in my earthly form. Before my transformation was complete, the doctors brought me back to this world, before I could totally understand my purpose. If given a choice, I most certainly would have stayed in that most beautiful supreme place.

My mother apparently died with me in the fire that consumed our small home in the Malibu Hills. The Santa Ana winds haunted our home in the canyon year after year, blowing their ciders of destruction by random, selecting to devour any structure by flame that stood in it's hungry path. Hardly a year ever passed we were not advised to evacuate, as flames would threaten our little wooden 1960 bungalow style house. Our good fortune ran out in September of 2007; setting my fait on a different course. A fait that would but me between two worlds, one of the living and one of the dead. Condemned to this worldly body until I can find a way back to him, he who holds the key to my existence and all the answers to my life and essential purpose.