His three boys just stared at him blankly as if they had no idea what he was talking about. Of course, they knew exactly what he was talking about, but it didn’t seem right that a man this lucid and vivacious should be so willing to walk through that gate from which there was no return.
“Because the truth of our existence is not easy to face. And it’s messy. For all too many, it’s just easier to throw their hands up in the air and wait for a savior to come along to set everything right with a single, destructive wave of the hand. And it’s especially gratifying if you’re convinced the savior-in-question hates the same people you do.”
They followed the foreman over to the dig site with each of the trenches walled off by stone pavers which were carefully stacked and laid in masonry fashion. Human skeletons and primitive tools seemingly materializing out of the earth while remaining partially encased in it. Every patch of overturned ground marked by string-tied grids.
“This is Seafaring Man right here,” said the foreman, as they came to the deepest of the trenches.
Dr. Farah looked down at the fossilized skeleton lying below with a reverential gleam in her eye. “I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you, my friend. My whole life, in fact.”
This was revolution in its rawest form, of gliomas arising from the glial cells surrounding his brain and spinal cord. This wasn’t one of those dissociative episodes which mimicked the sensation of dying. This was actual dying.
Adrian lowered the letter to his lap and stared out the window with glossed-over eyes. They had entered the suburbs. Tree-lined neighborhoods with spacious and perfectly manicured front yards. No fences, no barred windows. No worries. It took all the fortitude he could muster to resume with his aunt’s letter, the contrast between the blithe window scenery and the carefully inked words almost too painful to behold in juxtaposition.
“Remember, anything that makes you feel like a tiny dot in a big picture is a lie!”
It took all the fortitude in him to step forward and place his own hand on that ageless section of rock where some of the darkest and brightest of souls had left pieces of themselves to live on within its coarsened grains. The coldness and the abrasiveness and the faint beating of a dormant heart seeping into his bloodstream by the conduit of an enfeebled touch.
Because the world had turned and could not be put back the way it was. Nor could it be made right. But there was something to be salvaged from it. A faint light slanting across the road ahead to suggest there was a way by which to press onward. And that’s how she would always think of the concept of Besa and those who embodied it. An integral part of a new and unwritten canon to replace that which had been outgrown.
And of everyone on the greenbelt that day, her starlit eyes found the one person who didn’t think he could be seen.
It could even be found in something as simple as a handcrafted specimen, passing from one traveler to the next along its inevitable course toward that rendezvous where all the stories were told and registered to the pages of cosmic memory.
“She’s not my soul mate. And anyway, terrible fucking sub-genre. The whole, you-think-you-found-your-true-love-only-for-your-real-true-love-to-come-along. And then, of course, hilarity ensues.”
The conviction and clarity in her voice and her expression were that of a young adult woman which was exactly how she appeared to him. For a moment, he thought he was hallucinating. Or still dreaming. There was a second or two where he even considered that maybe a future version of his daughter had skipped back in time to relay some critical message to him. But then she blinked and her stare was vacant and her breathing suddenly very labored. That’s when he knew he was acutely awake even though he wasn’t ready to be.
He knew it was an omen. He was being summoned back to that place from which all was born.
“I don’t even have a boss. Just a liaison. Some young rockabilly Australian gal who comes around maybe every other day or so to check on me. And then if I ask her a question, she responds with some snappy insult and just moves on, leaving me to wonder if there’s an actual answer couched within it like some kind of mean-spirited riddle or if she’s truly just fucking with my head. It’s like being in a sit-com except dryly British and without the laugh track.”
And then it happened, just as he knew it would. Because somehow, he had been there before. Maybe it had been by way of a dream, either the waking or slumbered kind. Or maybe it was just an idea flitting across the mind as he peered into his rearview mirror or caught a glimpse of them out a window that momentarily took his breath away.
Whatever it was, it had all come back around again.
To that nexus where all was forever fulfilled.
Sonja carefully inscribed every word to her heart and mind where they would be forever canonized. Words that she would recite, sing and venerate at least once a day until her eventual passing many decades after.
“But what is it that we actually ‘see’ when we observe a single quantum particle making a wave interference pattern? In essence, we are seeing echoes, or tracers, of alternate versions of the universe in which we believe ourselves to exist.”
But when Joshua began to zone off, the three of them exchanged a winced look. By the stinging in their tears and the lumps in their chests, they knew it was time. Moments later there was a fresh glass of water and the iridescent Utopia case sitting alone atop the slightly wobbly stool—a most unpretentious nightstand for a most unpretentious man. The three of them couldn’t tear their eyes away. The haunting poignance and stark minimalism of it. It should have been a painting, one of them said.
When that most unexpected of crafts came bobbing and tacking toward him, his breath caught in his chest and his eyes blinked and they were shiny and watery like those crystalline puddles where the first stirrings of life came to be. Because it was by way of the beginning that all was redeemed.
And so it was here, where finally he had found his way home.
The word “ordinary” might have come to mind, except he also found her to be quite beautiful, in an unintentionally understated kind of way. Her hair was stringy and at that awkward length where even he could see all the split ends. She had a little round bulb at the tip of her nose and the wider she smiled the harder she pursed her lips which made her seem kind of psychotic. But she also had these Arctic-glacier blue eyes and just about the most perfect cheekbones he had ever seen.
His heart was racing wildly and tears could be felt rolling down his cheeks. But these things were very far away. Much closer was the dizzying reel of a life replaying in fast-forward to that familiar soundtrack of his favorite songs from forgotten days resounding audibly in the great amphitheater which was the Big Sky. A visceral reminder that beauty still existed in the world, or his mind, or whichever.
But no matter how far that animate strand ventured across the abysses and no matter how deep into the hidden folds of an infinite dream-verse of its own making, there was always something to draw it back into even the most tiresome of dead ends.
Race a construct
Whiteness an invention
But blackness has been made real
A righteous fuck-you to their oppression
“We’re trying to trick the rainbow into the glass jar, so to speak, so we can utilize it for our purposes. But because the rainbow is as much a phenomenon that takes place in the observer’s head as it does in the atmosphere, we ultimately have to trick ourselves.”
“You didn’t tell us where you want the ashes spread,” said Benjamin, circling back.
“Honestly, it’s of little importance to me. They’ll just end up deep in the earth’s crust either way, right? Maybe finding their way into a magma chamber to be violently expelled into the open air after hundreds of thousands of years. So whatever you three decide is fine by me.”
Joshua leaned forward, breathing deeply in and out, waiting for the pain to hit him like one does after catching their toe on a sharp edge. Except knowing it would besiege not only his entire body and every faculty but also the whole of his mind and the light of his soul. Wondering what it was going to feel like to have his heart ripped out of his chest and stomped on while painfully lucid during the whole thing.
“It’s a reminder that God is in everything, and everything in God. In which case, there is nothing that does not belong. Nothing that is not cherished. How could there be? Because God is perfect, which means everything that could ever be is also perfect. Life is merely a ritual performance to celebrate this essential truth.”
Joshua understood now that the struggle of life and death was a struggle of connection. Of neurons struggling to transmit their signals to the rest of the body’s cells to remind them to breathe and to pump and to purge. To remind them that they were a cohesive unit with the unified objective of preserving their distinctness in defiance of uncompromising forces always seeking to reshuffle and reorganize. Hostile to the very idea of stagnation. Or, on the flip side, of hijacked cells struggling to convince blood vessels to continue providing nourishment, despite their deviating from the original program. To convince them that destruction was its own creation.
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