Synopsis: barely conscious

dead people live in a dead world, see dead things, feel dead things. But the thing I remembered feeling was something in between – like a tiny string was keeping me still there in the upper world of the Living, but everything was dark and all light was gone, and I couldn’t feel a wind in my ears any more, like the soul living there, the one keeping up everything good was gone. The soul giving me a slight breeze within. I couldn’t feel anything, really, not even pain. It was just complete darkness then, and as I stayed like that for a long time, just drifting in emptiness with no destination, I knew I wasn’t dead.

imagine your whole life is just a dream. elea collins, 15, is mistaken to enter a sidepath led by the starlights, and soon she learns everything she has ever heard isn't real. on her struggle to the new world, she also needs to decide between the dead and the living - and sometimes preferring the darkness is better than eternal light.

"On the last steps of the endless glass staircase I started slightly to remember, remember how was living, what the stars looked like. And what was their meaning up there, as they neither didn’t exist or existed; I knew I was aware, somehow conscious. Why shine down from the same old sky to be forgotten – only pictures in such heights, that no-one could ever understand them?
And the answer was distances; for distances they did exist – to tell us about a world that was there but what we couldn’t see – a world that couldn’t exist without someone knowing about it. And every time we gazed up to the skies maybe to see a shooting star – someone up there gazed back."