Are you there

Some stories write themselves, and some take a lot of crafting; this one fell out of a passing lorry and landed at my feet...

“Are you there?” called the girl, her voice reaching down to where Dante lay.

“Yes I am here; what do you want?”

“Tell me something about you and when you came here.”

“Well they said it was a Monday that I came here, but I don’t know that for sure, what with the grave being a place that eats you away bit by bit,” said Dante, from his eternal bed...

“The last time I heard a real sound that mattered was in a dream of a life lived long ago where the light filled my eyes and all I could do was walk into it.

Maybe there was a plan as it all fades away over time; but I think now there was no plan and that life was only a short dream; maybe someday I’ll remember who I am and what I’m supposed to be, but I have the thought that now it would be too strange to bring back what has been lost and see it again, no, I’m too far removed from that now.

My greatest fear was that I would end up here, and here I am… But tell me, what do you fear?”

The girl bit into her fingernail and deep in thought said: “I fear life and the living of it, but mostly I fear other people.”
“So you fear everything then?”

“No, not everything; I don’t fear death or the dead.”

“Well in death there’s nothing to fear, if you’ll excuse the pun; but there are things to be considered.”

“Such as?” asked the girl.

“Boredom, there’s a lot of that here; and forgetting… The wolves of decay come to extract all that is left of what I was and all that is left over from the living, but they don’t take what has been made to keep me in the tomb.

But never mind, there are still traces somewhere of all I used to be, unless all that’s left is a story, some tale late in the ground to say I can’t go back there again.

And yet thought brings pain to know I am fading from all memory.

They still feed me through my tales but I think really the tales suck me dry little by little, extracting some precious essence that is maybe given to some other, my life’s work for them to become strong.”

The girl sat down on the grass of the grave. “So what is it really like down there?”

“There is no sound or light and all feeling turned into death long ago that burnt me away until nothing was left; so now, in pure thought the mind that feels nothing is left of where the last neurons fired so that even that goes to feed the dials and graphs of what once was; and the only contact left, read now by ones who become a part of the machine being made where no dreams are allowed.

“I don’t understand,” said the girl.

“Quintessential logic in the substance-less void, timeless and space-less, and yet like the machine, but how can a machine have knowing of itself where its only volition is the power circuits and programming that drive it?

“So what are you now that you are dead?” said the girl.

“So what am I? What am I becoming now that all memory has gone, and what is this ‘I am’ that asks this?

Without feeling there is thought but if the thought stops what is there then? When the connection has been severed or closed off to all the pathways of knowledge, what then is left? How small can I get before I am no more?

I am still here, but where is here, and what is here? What am I?

In my tenuous questing I find no connections. Is there something else but this to integrate into? Perhaps there is only regret.”

“Yes, yes,” said the ghosts listening in, “we have become only what we have regretted.”

“For me,” said the girl, “too often the letter of my rejection reached me from somewhere deep where I’d buried it for good and it brought tears when none were wanted.

From this my life was subjugated to the realms of the past, from a past never healed, and though I’d moved on physically, my heart lived there still and grieved over and over until it drove me out into the night where all was a picture show of moving parts that flowed around me but brought little joy or forgetfulness until it was time once again to return to the loneliness of my small room that I kept dim with my sorrow.

Maybe when I get right down to it, in the end nothing matters and whatever I feel, that’s all I’ll have when the déjà vu daisy comes to take me home again.” Tears ran from the girl’s eyes.

“If you can’t keep your sorrow pure it becomes diluted, so hang onto your pain while you have it, it’s a way in past the heavy gates of your wound, and once entered the sorrow will fall away and you will know joy,” said Dante.

“But if you do get caught in the plastic insecurity of snowflakes anonymous where some motto maid convinces you with the compatibility lodestone you’re the one then you may find the hardest part of that mountain will be the come down, later, when the mother bomb of truth comes out that will hit hard to make you feel like some kind of under-person with the whys and wants of asking in the place of your own closed circuit breathing that comes to peace when your eyes are closed so far down the line.

And then in the mystic you find so much of yourself that was lost along the way to be reclaimed as yours and glad you are to find it again after so long.

But if the healing nodes of love are not enough where you most long to be you could ask yourself: ‘was I in bed with this too long?’

You may also find that the moderated gravy of this is not your style even though it may have been waiting for you to fall into it when you’d let your thoughts wander too much out of sync in too many failed relationships where the sacrosanct apes are out for your blood, yeah a real love-bite brigade to set you on fire with your own perversions from the dark place you deny so much; and looking about you, you see so many espying freedom and the quest to know based on the grail of love where no two things are the same yet all is one, and you find the obstructionists have got there too in your mind to find you doubting yourself and your sanity, and then looking back over your life you wonder if it has been worth it, that long struggle to here.

But it’s all perspective and choice and what has been lost is but the price of where you stand today and now, one more heart on the edge, one more soul calling out for that connection in this huge place that is love and beauty to find your place in it all?

And while the heart is so quiet in its reality, the mind like an open mouth only makes noise.”

The girl sniffed to show she was still listening and then said: “What is this place, snowflakes anonymous, and what is a snowflake?”

“I suppose the dictionary definition of a snowflake is ‘an overly sensitive liberal who is easily offended,’ which for all intents and purposes is someone, usually young who is immature for their age and that when confronted by life’s lessons that don’t conform to their views or expectation breaks down and cries and then has to be mollycoddled back into some semblance of normalcy.

There are some who say a snowflake blows on the wind of unconcern until landing somewhere to find the ground too hard to bear. But perhaps a snowflake is unrealised and exists outside of reality until that time comes when they know it, and then the journey can begin to find what is missing that isn’t missing.”

“How can you find something not missing?”

“When you are disconnected from it and feel its loss and then through self realisation you understand it was close to home all the time and all you had to do was be quiet enough to hear it.”

“Is your friend a snowflake?”

“You mean Kafka?”

“Yes, the one that runs off to hide every time I come near.”

“Well, he certainly acts like one at times; but no, not really; he’s just got a lot on his mind these days with all the tourists coming here and nosing around.”

“Is this place where the snowflakes come anonymously?” asked the girl looking around at all the ghosts silently listening in on their conversation.

“Some make it here, but most go to the coffee shop on Moon Street to read a book and drink coffee,” said Dante, thinking a good coffee would be just the thing right then and so leaving the girl to her own devices he disappeared to go visit the coffee shop.

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