The After-Life
In my alternate world I hardly ever wash dishes. Once in a long while, I’ll hang out laundry only to smell the air-fresh fabric and see the sun streak through bedsheets, as they flap in the breeze like flags. Normally, I’m engaged in much more highly-elevated activities— such as writing a novel that will answer all of the questions of the human heart—the yearning , twisting sorrow of furrowed brows and wringing hands. I picture you reading the closely typed lines of the first chapter and sighing, “Ah…at last.”
When I’m not at my desk, speaking quieting into my transcribing device, I am playing the piano or…the cello—music rolling spontaneously onto keys or strings—my face in a rapturous expression. I guess I am a kind of angel. It would seem so.
But not the diaphanous kind—no, I am flesh and blood, sinew and wildly beating heart. I am flirtatious smiles and long legs that bound across grassy fields. I am youth and energy and wisdom and knowing glances. I am where I have always yearned to be.
It happened one night when, as they say, I least expected it. How could I possibly expect this? My life was like so many others—like yours I am sure—bumbling from one embarrassing encounter to another. My words like cactus leaves—pointy, barbed—never expressing the poetry I heard in my head. I saw the confused looks on the faces of friends and temporary lovers—you know the looks—a glance from under hooded eyes, a curl of the lip—a sudden departure from the corner of the bar—a phone not answered. I lived in a cloud of disappointment, a dank shape around my body like a second skin…one I longed to slither out of—like a snake, leaving a discarded shadow like a pile of dry leaves.
It happened during rain—a sudden downpour—shoppers scurried into doorways or snapped umbrellas into the air like swords, where they hovered for a few moments before blowing inside out—skeletons reaching skyward until they were thrown and cursed into the nearest dumpster. But I was overcome by a thirst, an uncontrollable desire to open my mouth wide, my head flung back—my tongue lashed with cool rain drops splashing, washing me clean.
That’s when it happened.
I felt the rain fill my mouth—I coughed, sputtered, gasping for air, clutching my chest. Then a shudder went through my whole body—like an electric shock. I thought I had been struck by lightening—perhaps I had, although I heard no thunder. I heard nothing …or the kind of nothing that you hear in a dark tunnel…at night…just before sleep. Has that ever happened to you? It’s like a kind of sucking sensation more than a sound. A persuasion. That’s it—-exactly! I was persuaded into a different dimension. The street was dry—in fact it wasn’t a street —it was a place, a locus, a container of space.
And I was in it…and I was it.
I know it sounds crazy, but it didn’t feel crazy. It felt ….beatific…like a cool hand on your forehead. You know what I mean? It was ….there are no words. I’ll have to make some new words for this. They don’t exist now and I want to tell you what it was like—how it is like, now.
Like a door left slightly ajar, like a chord sustaining past silence. The steady, naked eyes of an infant—-that comes close.
And so I sat down on a kind of cushion that appeared in front of me and began to think or conjure …or another word that has never existed.
Written on February 18, 2021