You’re a child, the first time it happens. The how isn’t really important, but the result… well, dying tends to leave an impression. You wake up to the sky, barely moments later, body fixed and clothes destroyed. You don’t tell your parents, they’d just scold you for bothering them. You don’t tell your friends, because they’d call you a liar.

So you keep this secret, the secret of the place between. You visit that place rarely as you grow, you’ve learned to be cautious, to keep this part of you hidden. When you’re a teenager, you realize what’s happening, that you’re dying and coming back. That death isn’t sticking. There’s only ever a handful of minutes you’re in this between place, but it’s enough for you to start making connections.

There’s no one else in this space, not that you’ve ever met. It’s also something impossible to describe. It’s both everything and nothing, it’s heavy and light, it’s bright and dark. In this place, it feels like there are no limits, that you could just know whatever you wanted. But when you wake up, all the answers, all the knowledge is gone.

You don’t think that this place is heaven, nor is it hell. It doesn’t remind you of anything you’ve learned about any religion or belief system. This isn’t Valhalla, or Nirvana, or Olympus, or the Land of the Remembered. But it’s comforting in it’s familiarity.

The older you get, the more you understand. You can’t die. You won’t die. When you’re a young adult, your body stops changing, stop aging. It’s subtle at first, but you start to notice when your friends start developing wrinkles, dying grey hairs, complaining about their bodies not being as young as they once were. You don’t have to deal with those. Your skin is wrinkle-free, your hair is glossy and healthy, and your joints don’t ache in the rain.

It terrifies you, because you realize that you’re going to outlive everyone you love. You’re suddenly grateful that you never found a lover, that you never had a family. Because how do you explain that they will grow old and die, and you won’t? How do you explain that you don’t know why you can’t die?

You start to take more risks, start to visit that place more often. It never changes, never differs. You die. You come back. It is a fact.

Centuries later — maybe millennia, you stopped counting after a while — you’ve started to spend longer and longer in that space, and it’s become more comfortable. You can remember more, but you have no one to share that knowledge with. And that’s when you realize the curse that it is.