Remenisce

I was dead this time. I knew I was dead. In that strange way you know in dreams, without knowing anything, I was dead. I didn’t breathe. I didn’t think, though I assumed at the time that I did. I was just there. Just a mixture of particles in the air wanting to make Billie, but never, never coming together, never sticking. They kept getting separated in the wind and the water. They kept burning in the sunlight. They just kept running away.

So I was nothing. Not Billie, not anyone. I had no home because I wasn’t even human yet.

The lightning flashed, and it looked like your face had lit the sky, sending a jolt through every part of me, every atom of every cell that belonged to me. Cells I didn’t even know were mine raced around in a rhythm, suddenly red and pulsing like millions of pieces of a frantically thumping heart. They shuddered. They flew, or crawled, or whatever they did, but they all moved at once, all coming to the same spot, to that charred spot on the ground where the electricity had fallen from the sky.

Your face again. My conciousness flashed with yours, and suddenly, I knew that what I had assumed were thoughts were only fleeting whispers floating through the air. How many were mine, I couldn’t tell. But never before had I realized how few real people were really there. How few were concious, like us. How few knew what thoughts were and what a true heartbeat felt like.

How few knew how beautiful and utterly frightening the world was.

I could see it all so clearly. The sky, constantly flashing and raining hot water over a world which was already so full of it, leaving a warm mist over the rocky surface. The mountains protruding from the earth sprayed their own showers with it, red hot lava flowing over the land, over the little parts of a billion people who weren’t even yet people. All they could do was run, was move, was hope to collide with one another to find the spark of a soul that would pull them into one entity.

Like I had.

I crumbled to the earth, water forming in my now-green eyes to blur my vision of this chaos. What was this? Why did my heart beat so fast? I was confused and scared, Mikey, and it was because of you. It was because you sparked life into me, gave me a soul that pulled me into one human, crying naked and alone in the midst of a newly forming earth. I could feel the ground shaking below me. I could feel a thousand million other souls forming, all scared, all enthralled with what life really was, none ready to go back to not knowing, because God, was it beautiful.

Your arms wrapped around me. They were cool and calming. I felt good, and the chaos suddenly pulled back, silenced and unable to touch us. God, it felt so right, Mikey. Your arms made the tears stop falling from the sky, the rain from my eyes. Suddenly, the world was only blue and serene, and I looked into your eyes to see that they matched it. Blue and serene like the water around us. I wondered if you thought the scenery matched my eyes, if all you saw was green. I wondered if I could kiss you.

But I awoke too soon to find out.

Awoke to not your bed and not mine, but to your living room couch. To your daughter jumping on my stomach and asking why I was there. Why I wasn’t with Aunt Adie.

I wondered how to explain the word “divorce.”