That’s what he said.

Not in panic. Not in remorse.
Just clarity — unnerving in its honesty.

He wasn’t afraid of judgment, or karma, or hell.
Not even death itself in the abstract.
He was afraid of the moment it happens — that last breath. The crossing.

He said he "lived that moment before"
And I’ve thought about it ever since.

Because for the narcissist, it’s never been about what happens after.
No matter what they say they believe — Christian, atheist, spiritual — they are never truly afraid of the afterlife.

Why?

Because they’ve never fully believed it applies to them.

Judgment presumes accountability.
Karma assumes continuity of soul.
Heaven and hell require inner alignment or consequence.

But the narcissist is divorced from those ideas.
Not intellectually — performatively, yes.
But emotionally, existentially, they remain outside of it all.

They live as if they are exempt.
Above consequence.
Untouchable by cosmic law.

So it’s not the afterlife they fear.
It’s the moment when the game ends.
When the self they curated so carefully is no longer mirrored by the world.
When there’s no more stage.
No more eyes.
No more script.

Just silence.
And the terrifying suspicion that beneath the mask, there’s nothing.

What makes it worse is that they live small versions of that moment every day:
When they’re ignored.
When admiration fades.
When someone sees through them and remains unmoved.

Each one is a micro-death.
A flicker of the truth they’ve worked so hard to avoid:
that the self they perform isn’t built to survive silence.

But here’s the paradox:
The hell they live in — they stay in it.
Because it’s theirs.
They authored it.
They control the narrative, even if it’s painful.

Death, though, is non-consensual.
It happens without approval, without script, without audience.
It is the one moment they cannot perform.

And that is what terrifies them.

Not what comes after.
But that, in the end, no matter how much they controlled the illusion —
the show stops.

And there may be no self left to exit the stage.

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