[fiction]

Do you believe that we are reincarnated when we die? That I could come back as a caterpillar that would metamorphosis into a butterfly and you a baby lamb to be lead to the slaughter? Do you believe in the fiery eternalness of hell and the heavenly highs of God’s good grace? Do you believe in Karma or an oasis where seven virgins wait? Do you believe when they put you into the earth you stay there, trapped, while the earth slowly tries to reclaim what humanity has stupidly locked in a wooden box, chaining it to an in between world? Or do you believe when your ashes are thrown into the sea, you’ll become part of the fish and coral, hidden in sharks and shells? Do you believe that your soul ceases to exist but your energy flows into other living things? Do you believe in ghosts, in unfinished business and haunted buildings? Will you stay here and haunt this hayshed where we have spent so many hours, your spirit the essence of myths and urban legend? Do you think perhaps that when you stand before God, he’ll see the pure heart that no one else did and he’ll make you an angel with sweet golden wings and soft knowing eyes?

What is the beyond?

Where is it?

Is it up there behind that cloud, do those towers of vapour conceal the gateway? Or have we been eternally damned, left to cohort with the rotten and evil of this world in a prison of immortal souls? Are we sinners because I held your hand and you held mine and it meant all the world to us? Do you think perhaps the Pope is there, right next to God and Jesus and Mohammed, and Gautama is there too, with Krishna and the Rainbow Serpent and all the many creators? When you arrived did they great you with a grin that made it clear, they are in this together, they are the many faces of one great thing, so wonderfully large we cannot fathom it. Or were we, two bodies intertwined, cloud gazing together just a collection of atoms and molecules? Did bits of matter collide one day before time begun, before good and evil had even be conceived, did they build together slowly, growing as shrubs and trees and birds until we arrived at that moment in time, with the soft young grass and the racing cloud-ships? Did we even exist or is this too a virtual world? Are we just someones pawns or charcters in an obscene storybook? Do you think some power far, far bigger than us brought us together, that everything happens for a reason? Do you know how our story sits in my memory, how it possesses me and smoulders in my mind? Can you really believe that someone could so cruelly script this plot? Do you think we are we really the champions of our own destinies, the makers of our own fates? Are we really so wonderfully, so terribly alone here?

Do you see that cloud shaped like a wave from where you are? It’s a great big grey wave of despair that is about to wash over me, to drown me where I lie. I have never hated God so much. I have never doubted him more. I have never wanted, so hard and so urgently, to believe he exists.

There are many ways for a person to die, this is just one. I will lie here until I disappear. I will wait like Buddha under the Bodhi tree or Christ in his cave awaiting reincarnation, until the grass grows over me or the gates above me open. I will lie here until I disappear, until three heavenly angels lift me gently away, or the devil himself grows weary of waiting and comes up and carries me home, until I am consumed by the earth, retuned to stone and soil.

I will lie here until I disappear, or until you come back to me.