A path to consequence.

I sat there, staring blankly at my epitaph – not knowing whether to laugh or cry. An inexorable wave of resignation inflamed every sinew in my shattered frame. This was it. The culmination of two decades etched neatly on to a tidy slab of grey. All was awhirl. My heart; pressed up tightly to my teeth, vociferous in its contempt, beat all sense of calm away from and beyond my conscious. Still I sat – melting into the desolate landscape, thirsting for reprieve.

            I had not expected this to be it.  There was no tunnel, no light, no zoetrope of life events flickering through my dying mind.  I was a floating body, adrift in a graveyard of spectres.  Born 1985, Died 2005.  Loving husband and father.  With only a quote to lift it beyond the ordinary – ‘Man plows the field and lies beneath, and after many a summer dies the swan.’  I regretted that as I regretted my apathetic existence.  It seemed pretentious, aspirational even, which is not the tone for an epitaph.  I felt tethered to the grave, unsleeping and existing in this strange hinterland between here and there.  When people came to visit their tears gave me strength.  Today, Sunday, my whole family was at the graveside, tending to the flowers and speaking in quiet prayer.  I felt like I had grown.  Strong enough to walk up to the rectory. I began up the hill. Losing my way, I reached a crossroad.

            I decided upon a path. I knew not where this path was taking me – the point was I was taking a path. I was moving forward. I absconded beyond the constraints of self-pity and began my course; through webs of thickets and shrubbery, clamouring through the dank underbelly of the forest. Trees flanked my every turn – the grotesque, angular forms mourning the trials of winters past. The moon sat aloft, it’s cold smile intermittently dissected by bulging clouds of wispy midnight grey. Bathed in its milky glow, I reached a clearing – my eyes burning in the flames that greeted me.

An owl hoots in the trees, a cricket sings in the thicket.  The moon is sinking and stars begin to swirl.  The ground is opening up with a groan.  Great soily teeth gape and maw underneath.  Despite my insubstantiality I am drawn downwards, I plummet towards the earth’s core.  The air is thick with wrenched souls.  I try and cast my mind back to earlier, to the epitaph in the graveyard, but it will not be distracted.  The hounds of hades bark at my heels between tormenting deceased postmen.  Golems swim in the river styx.  This was not what I had expected.  Nor was it adequate.

My skin begins to blister as flames consume my withering frame. The smell of burning flesh fills the air is fat bubbles and seeps out of the fissures materializing all over my body. I try to scream, but succeed only in gurgling on the boiling liquid that once served as organs – choking on what once gave me life. I crumple to the ground, writhing in unfathomable torment. And then nothing. My nerve endings scorched, I’m betrothed by a sense of calm. The calm that I had pursued for months. A lay still as my body spits and crackles in the roasting furnace – and for the first time in months I feel at ease. Enveloped in a numbing euphoria.

The light.  The pure perfect light.  How could I have lasted so long without it?  I feel whole, but the cruder facets of my being are disintegrating.  My personality disappears like a mirage and underneath I find myself dissolving into a hypnogogic kaleidoscope of geometric multiplicities in which every possibility was an actuality.  And in this ineffable vision I saw myself whole again, skin unflayed and recast around nerves that now sparkle with awareness, and I am drawn out of the ground, he is drawn, we are, out of the ground and born anew, through a process of forgetting, into the fresh eyes of an infant, blood-smeared and mewling.