25
As time spins faster, babies are born. Old women die. Wars rise up, truces come through. The world remains. And when I least expect it, a lifeline comes through. I know that giving Cooper the Muse, whenever it happens, will be the last thing I ever do here, and my time is running short. I have stayed long enough, and once the connection explodes, lightning in a dark room, I will have to leave and face the Confluence. But I am still not ready. Will I ever be ready? I miss everyone already, and I haven’t even left yet – how will I be able to handle never being able to see them regularly again? And I have no idea what awaits. I need a nudge, a push in any direction at all. And one day, the universe prepares me. It sends me a primer. The comfort. The light.
Up here you get many things, if you want them, at least. You can be granted your most simple desires, see your most profound urges given into. But you also get something else. You get to do what many humans pray for every day: you get to sit and talk to God.
I do not mean God in the sense that humans understand God. The universe sends itself down in the form of someone you loved as a human, and you get to ask them whatever your heart wants to know. It is easier that way. I found God’s aura one day while wandering a field that existed on Earth somewhere near St. Augustine, one of my favorite towns. I drove by it with Cooper and remarked that it was beautiful, and now I come to my own version of it, in my own heaven. On this day, I walk. I sing. (One of the coolest parts of the grey area is that you can choose your talents, and when I open my mouth, Whitney Houston multiplied by Celine Dion comes out.) And soon I hear something strange…
Wait, is that…
Suddenly a familiar voice calls out to me, using unfamiliar words. “It is the bravest thing anyone ever did, to believe you are not on your own in this world.”
“Mommy!”
I run to my mother. I embrace her. We hug for what is possibly months in Earth time. She kisses my head and touches my hair. And after all this time, she still smells like sunflowers.
I have dreamt about this moment many times during my second life, even though I tried not to mourn her. So much time was stolen from us when I was killed. I have floated in the universe and imagined what it would feel like, what I would say, how I would act, if I could get one more hug with her, one more walk with her, one more hour with her…if I could simply have a mommy again.
And here it is. But for some reason, all I can do is cry.
“I can’t believe it,” I say, crying for the first time in what feels like ages. “I can’t believe it. There’s so much I want to tell you. Mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy…”
“You always called me Mom,” she smiles as she holds me. “What changed?”
“Back then I was a child wanting to be an adult. Now I’m just a soul who knows she’ll always be your baby.”
She leans down and smells me. And all she says is this: “You raise me up, Summer.”
A hundred more years of hugging pass. And crying. Finally we sit on a bench that appears at a swish of her hand, and I can speak. “Oh my God – I’ve never seen you here. You’re from the Beyond?”
She nods.
“Oh, God – what’s it like?”
She opens her arms wide, and I see it all. But I don’t understand much. I see a vast, white, dome-like space. I see souls streaking to and fro like bats, leaving contrails in the sky. I sense a detachment from the realities I know now, a total shift in everything I know to be true. I cannot even see it as much as feel it: you are one with the universe there, and there are no barriers, not like there are here. It just…exists. And I am amazed.
As I sit with her, though, I sense that all is not well – it’s like when I travel so quickly through the cosmos, the surroundings blur and meld together. She wants to go. So I ask what I know she wants to tell me. “Wait. You’re not her, are you? Not really. Who are you?”
She smiles. “I am her, the one you knew. But I am also Everything. And I’ve come to answer what you need to know, not what you want to know.”
“Oh.” I look at her with new eyes. Or whoever “she” is, at least. “What do I need to know?”
“You tell me.”
I watch the world as a hurricane swirls in the sea west of Africa. There is so much I don’t understand about that planet. So much I will never understand about it. So I grab her hand and cuddle up against her, thinking of how strange it is that being made eternal has infantilized me. “Why are we born, besides to love each other?” I ask. “Why does disease exist? Why do people suffer? Where is the good in any of that? Where is-”
“Hold on, I just got here,” she smiles, and I notice she is wearing the watch she always used to wear – silver with Mickey Mouse ears. I bend down and kiss it. Maybe it really is her. “Find the good,” she says, and I remember again how much I love her. “It is there. You just have to look.”
“That tells me nothing. Why does hatred exist?”
“Why does the moon exist while the sun exists, too?”
“No, that’s not an answer. That’s nonsense. Please tell me why.”
She just stares at me. All the things I’ve ever wondered come flying out at her. “And why do people suffer? Why do evil fools become rich while sweet women live on the streets?”
“People did not suffer, not in the beginning, at least. Not before they gave in to fear and all the rest. Suffering is so temporal, so irrelevant. What is a human body, anyway? It is a frail, breakable shell meant to take care of the truly important thing – the soul – during the first stages of that soul’s existence, while that soul learns all the lessons it can. If something goes wrong with a body, like disease or injury, and the human dies, then the shell breaks, the butterfly emerges from the proverbial chrysalis, the soul flies free, and that soul is now able to explore the next step. Meaning, this place,” she says, gesturing at the grey area.
And I am speechless.
We watch the clouds for a while longer, this shimmering blue planet that I cannot even prepend to comprehend. “Why were humans put down there in the first place? Why do they exist? What’s the point of it all?”
“To love,” she smiles. “It sounds simple, but it’s massive. Love makes them so different from the rest.”
Then something else comes to mind – Cooper. “When two people love each other wholly, why are they taken away from each other?”
“Ah, there’s your first mistake. Two people bonded by love are never separated, not really. Separation is an illusion humans have created to explain what they cannot understand: eternity.”
I think about this. Then I look at her again. “Why do mosquitos exist?”
“Ah, the giant question of the cosmos,” she laughs.
“Why did you move on, if you’re so interested in the grey area?”
“Because there was nothing left to learn. I became one with the light. You remember, don’t you, the orb, when you died? That was the Beyond, coming to see if it wanted you.”
I remember it all: looking down and seeing my dead body, then seeing the orb move in, pulling at me, along with Mam, telling me I was going to stay. “The light?” I ask, not quite fully understanding. “The Beyond? …What’s up there?”
She smiles, this alien sent in the form of my mommy. “Happiness. In the grey area you were like a new parent, so filled with worry, fretting over your family’s every move and trying to meddle in everything you could. That is the point of the grey area, but what lies Beyond is so different. Think of how different it is when a child visits with his grandparents instead of his own parents. Parents fret and worry about their young ones, but grandparents sit on couches and smile down at their grandchildren, because they are removed from the responsibility of raising them. They are calm. They smile. They do not worry. This is the Third World, the Beyond. And I’m sure you remember what that was like, playing with Dominos on my floor,” she says, her eyes twinkling and her voice suddenly morphing and sounding exactly like my grandmother’s.
“Oh my God – you’re her? You’re Mam?”
“I am everyone,” she smiles. “We are all love in the end. But life on Earth is like childhood. The grey area is like college. And the Third World, the Beyond, is like old age. We watch. We love. We do not worry.”
“Don’t you miss everyone, in heaven?” I ask. She shakes her head, a tear in her eye.
“It doesn’t work like that. I know the truth. We are together. You just don’t understand how yet. I loved you once – why don’t I deserve to love you forever?”
Another heartbreaking question comes to me then – something I’d always wanted to know. “Mommy?”
“Yes?”
“Did Dad ever love me?”
My father left us when I was young and never really came back. He died ten years ago, but I only glimpsed him as he traveled onward – our connection had grown so weak, I couldn’t even reach him.
Another tear drips from her eye. “Oh, Summer. Of course he did. He was just too weak to show it. Remember that humans will never be exactly who you want them to be. Their souls are storms, and one cannot change the direction of a hurricane by wishing it another way. Wishes are beautiful and helpless, like crystal castles in violent sandstorms. But yes, of course your daddy loved you. Anyone would have to be a fool not to love you.”
This makes me feel a bit better. “Should I go with you?” I ask. “I’m so sick of this. And I miss you. I want to be with you. We have so much to catch up on.”
“When it is time, you will come. But first you must know a few things, you faithless, precious girl.”
“What?”
She smiles, and it makes me feel something I have not felt something in ages: hope. “Former humans are so similar to current humans,” she begins. “You feel so alone, here in the grey area. But you aren’t. We are still here. We never left. We don’t even have to go back to Earth to visit loved ones like you do – we are simply here, there, everywhere. Inside heaven and Earth. We live within the souls of our ancestors, and they live in us. The sun doesn’t stop existing just because it disappears from the sky every night, does it? Life doesn’t end. It just takes different forms, endlessly, forever.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you love Cooper?” my mom – or whoever this person is – asks me. I close my eyes. Even after all this time, whenever I think of him, I can swear there are stars inside me.
“Yes.”
“And do you feel that love?”
“Every day.”
“Then how, I ask, is he not here? How is he not with you, in love? Why would you ever deny anything you can feel, but not see?” She pauses. “Tell me: do the humans of your life still deny you?”
I wince. “Every day.”
“Exactly. So stop doing the same to me. Love never dies. It just hides for a while.”
I wait. Mommy, or whoever she is, reaches up and brushes my hair behind my ear. “You are so loved. And stop worrying about all the rest, darling. You are doing just fine. You are such a good soul.”
“I am?”
She pulls on my longish bangs, which remain when I cross into human form. “Oh, Summer. Paradise was opened for you, and you could’ve lived in the luxuries of this world forever – but you chose to ignore all that and focus on everyone else. You loved your family so much that you devoted your second life to the inhabitants of your first. Nothing is more courageous or more careless, the choice to make yourself your own last priority. And you didn’t just help your own loved ones – you used your powers to change hundreds of lives. Be proud of yourself for all the love you’ve sent out. I know I am.”
“You are?”
She kisses me. “You still don’t get it, do you? I am so proud of all your love. If it rained every time I thought of you, the world would drown.”
And all of the sudden it rushes in: just how important it is to have someone pat you on the back and tell you they are proud of you, even if they are dead.
“I have to tell you something else,” I say.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry I died,” I whisper, ashamed. She just smiles.
“Don’t be. I’m not sorry you lived. It was such a privilege to love you and lose you, baby girl.”
And I cry.
“You weren’t meant to know the whole story, anyway,” she says. “You will soon, though. Have a little faith in me. But for now, all you need to know is that I miss you, and I would be happy to spend a million lifetimes missing you.”
“Oh, God. I’m coming up there soon?”
I sound scared. She nods.
“When?”
“When the message has been passed on. When the love has been shared.”
I grow frustrated. “The love? The message?”
“The message of the eons. That is what the Three Worlds are about.”
I just watch her.
“Your people understand that three is a celestial number, with your Holy Ghost business. The first world is for making the mistakes and learning the lessons. The second world is for getting better and passing it on.”
“And what’s the third world for?”
“Love,” she smiles.
“But why not just write down a paper saying ‘this is the truth’ and send it to them? Why all the theatrics?”
“Oh, Summer. Did da Vinci use words to express all the thought and all the emotion and all the love that exist in a human’s eyes? No. Some stories are told with words, that is true. Others are told with a paintbrush. But the best ones are told with love.” Then she hugs me. “I must go back to the Third now. I love you, and I am always with you, even when you deny me. Godspeed.”
“No!”
I grab her, and suddenly I realize how young I still am, how alone I always was. I am a little girl who needs her mommy, and she can’t leave now.
“I’m sorry, but I must go. It is written. I love you so much, and I always will.” She turns back, and the sunrise dawns. “Oh, and Summer?”
“Yes?”
“Cooper. Go get him. Run to him. Now.”