An Insight - My Death, Amongst other Things.

Date: Friday January 30th 2009
Time: 20:42 GMT


It's not very original to keep a diary anymore is it?
It used to be kind of quirky; a past-time reserved for the more literary minded or women.
Now it's all over the place.
I mean, how many movies or books have you seen where the character(s) uses the medium of diary entries?
So, with all that in mind I rather begrudgingly set pen to paper. Not to sound too melodramatic but within these pages I shall explain my situation as best I can and shed a little light on the world from an alternative angle.

First things first - I am a zombie. Undead. Infected.
But, I hasten to add, I'm looking pretty good for a rotting semblance of the human body! Not that I've had very many compliments from either side, but give them time.

My name is Morgan and I live...wait a minute, that doesn't sound right somehow. It's not like I "live" anywhere now, but what exactly is it that I do do...?
I suppose I should say: "Right now I'm rotting in Nottinghamshire," yes! I rather like the sound of that. Okay, so I'm currently rotting in the English county of Nottinghamshire, where I was born roughly 17 years ago.
My parents are both dead, but don't look at me! It wasn't me who bumped them off, I was at school at the time. To be frank it was rather horrible that day, walking in from the last day before the summer holidays and finding them both in the living room...
But I find that once you've died it becomes rather easy to forget things from "before" and hey, at least they didn't come back like I did.

I've spoken to many people since my death, mainly about what it's like to be a zombie, I'm part of a, I guess you'd call it an awareness group - we travel around the country giving talks to school kids and the like, when they let us in that is. But I'll elaborate on that later.
You're probably more interested in how I turned, aren't you? To be honest it's not what I'd call a fascinating read, but why else would you be reading?

Okay, I'm relatively new to the Z-scene having only been one for the past 8 or 9 months; I was bitten on my street by a tramp.
Yeah, I know, how glamorous! I would have preferred to have been bitten by someone a bit, well, cleaner, but no sense in complaining now, it all leads to the same ends anyway.
For sure I was devastated when it happened, for a start it hurt like hell - right in the hip! but then as the days crawled by and I spent more time unconscious than awake, I reasoned with myself that it wouldn't be too bad, sure I'd smell and bits of me would flake off, not forgetting the constant threat of being shot in the head, but I'd still be able to walk and talk. And eat...
Some zombies as you well know can't talk and if I'd become one of those morons I think I'd have been more inclined to throw myself off a bridge. Luckily for me I retained my vocal chords and shambled into the undead with anticipation.
Dying wasn't exactly as I'd imagined it, I won't say it was painful, that's the wrong word it was just unlike anything I had ever physically or mentally experienced in my life.

There was a certain amount of discomfort, centring around the bite area and I noticed that despite my disinfecting it and regularly changing the gauze, I was developing gangrene. Nice, huh?
You know how sometimes you can feel your pulse in your eye? Well I had the same feeling, only much stronger, radiating out from my mangled hip. It was almost as if I could feel the blood going to and coming from the site slowing and coagulating, becoming sluggish and my veins beginning to constrict and close.
Forever.
Roughly 2 days after being bitten, I started to get dizzy and had brief fainting spells. Sometimes I would wake up in an unflattering heap at the bottom of the stairs having absolutely no memory of why I'd even been upstairs. Gradually, my waking hours were dwindling to a mere 3 or 4 hours per day and I was a little scared. I wasn't scared of dying, not exactly, but of the pain that would accompany it. I was scared I would suffocate or haemorrhage or any number of horrible things, but on the 5th day everything became clear.
I don't know if I went temporarily mad or if the last coherent parts of my living brain had suddenly banded together to bring me to my senses, but I know that after that I felt no fear nor pain; like I said, just a dull discomfort.
Of course, I can't tell you precisely when I "passed over", but I know it had been almost a week and that one minute I was lay in bed reading a good book (I forget which one now) and the next I was plunged into a darkness so vast and so black I thought I would go blind just by looking at it. I think this is where I underwent my transformation.
I believe that I died first and then became undead, rather than skipping straight to the good part, and my death I remember with some clarity, at least I remember what it felt like.
I was surrounding by that inky, impenetrable blackness and I had the bizarre sensation of floating. Some part of my brain, long buried and rusted with age recalled memories of the womb and I suppose death is a reverse form of birth just without an epidural.
Very, very slowly I felt myself pulled downwards although I only knew this through physical sensation as my surrounding didn't change one jot. The darkness had no texture nor any sense of being the absence of light - it was pure, unadulterated dark, no two ways about it. My whole life did not flash before my eyes but I did have time to think about the things I had done and hadn't done and I vaguely missed my parents and my old friends, but I was caught up in the moment and if I was connected in any way to my body I would have trembled with excitement.
With a very real bump, I felt myself dumped rather unceremoniously into my body once more. I got pins and needles. Then everything inside of me went deathly quiet and I knew then that I was undead.
It's rather odd going to sleep and then waking up to find you have no pulse. You take for granted the pumping muscle harnessed in the rib cage and the constantly labouring lungs until one day POOF! You've got neither. It's a strange sensation having a dormant set of vital organs and I have to say the first thought that popped into my skull was:
"I wonder if I could sell my organs for science?"
Yes, yes, yes, it was a stupid idea I know, but I don't need them and I suppose I'd be considerably lighter without them and what self respecting girl would turn an opportunity like that down?
In the end, I decided to keep my viscera and attempt to keep my outward appearance as close to normal as a mid-priced foundation would allow.
Oh I get through tons of that stuff now, I might as well bathe in the bloody stuff! I tried latex but once the warm weather fronts move in you're a goner! Apart from the foundation I have to keep a steady store of theatrical make-up on hand in order to create things like veins, because I've found having none frightens the kiddies and the elderly.

The question I always get asked at our awareness functions is "What's it like to be a zombie?"
It's very difficult to explain this to the living, much like describing colour to the blind (I should know; my boyfriend's blind, which I suppose is a blessing when it comes to our relationship now!) and in the early days I did try to demonstrate this by biting chunks out of them as kind of a show-and-tell presentation, but this didn't go down well as you can imagine.

I'm past that immature stage now and keep my appetites at bay by constantly chewing a piece of raw meat, non-human of course. I have eaten human meat before but under the instruction of my boyfriend and fellow campaigners for undead rights, I've switched permanently to bovine.
I feel somewhat like how I imagine a smoker/junkie gone cold turkey feels like, there's always a constant ache in my stomach and in my head and if I'm very tired or if I'm angry, I find it best to avoid all human contact as I tend to lash out, so that part of being a zombie, quite honestly, sucks. But apart from that everything's tickety-boo!
My boyfriend and I sleep with me manacled to the headboard (which I'm sure some would prefer, am I right? *wink wink*) and as I said before; bits of me do have the habit of dropping off at the most inconvenient times, but we learn to live with these little setbacks, don't we?

Anyway, if you've come this far - bravo! I aim to keep you posted as regularly as possible but be ready for delays in entries as my fingers are a little delicate and I type a little too vigorously for decomposing flesh to withstand...you get the point.

Take care and please, If you see a zombie, why not shake his hand? You could make a valuable friend.

/FlyGirl
x x x