21:08, the car dash read as he cranked the heat. The GPS informed him he was halfway to Kkotji.

He sighed. Not upset, not content, simply a sigh of existence. A sigh of the existence he would lose.

But the man, he then remembered, the man had consoled him that he would not revert to simply being unborn, he would grow, instead, into a different state of existence: existence after life.

That got him thinking, what is life? Is it only the existence before death? Or does life continue in the post-death experience?

The man was tight lipped on the subject.

He turned on his phone, and scrolling to the very bottom of his playlists, he clicked on a title: Nostalgia. He had compiled this over the last year.

Some people save a bottle of whiskey for their last days, he saved songs; music was his lifeblood. 

Compiled in that final playlist was the soundtrack to his life. The songs by which he was sung to sleep, those to which his mother danced with him, the sweet songs of his first and only love.

His favorite music from the age of 12 until 25 was a sea of thoughts and emotions which pervaded his mind, keeping out the dark of night. In his car, headlights cleared the way.

To the collective nostalgia of childhood club mixes, he danced in the seat, hoping his car would stay straight with no hands on the wheel. He laughed along to those songs with the happiest memories contained in the flow of their notes. And finally, to those songs which showed the love of his family, those songs in which he could feel the slow passage of time, he cried.

Before he realized, as the final crescendo embraced his mind... "you have arrived."

He parked. The engine stayed running as he checked the clock once more: 22:42.