28
A boom erupts from the heavens, and the ride of two lifetimes begins.
I am sucked into a kind of vortex through the flames, a vortex that is sucking up everything that has come and everything that will come, and the lights of my second life start flying at me. I have not felt this alive since the summer of 2014. I cry as all the people I’ve helped and loved rush past me: I see Monica and her daughter, Mary-Katherine and SJ and Chase and my mother and the boy who never hugged his brother: I see them all, and I am so humbled. Then something vibrates, then twitches, then I am sucked into another wormhole. I am flung past sights and sounds and moments from my first life, the one on Earth, and they are all from so long ago, all wrapped in so much love. I see childhood giggles and teenaged crushes and twenty-something love by the sea. I see kindergarten handprint paintings and middle school dances and nine-year-old wishes for a crush to notice me – I see it all. I want to stay and watch, but I feel a pinch, and my surroundings warp and I fly through a new Lovehall, except it is not the one I know – this one is new. These images are somehow alien, and yet wholly familiar. And soon I realize this is the Lovehall I would have earned had I survived my surgery.
I have heard of this before – if you act well in the grey area, you can be shown a glimpse of what would’ve happened if you had remained on Earth. But I have never seen anything like this. Suddenly I am seeing the life I would’ve lived if I had never been killed, in screaming color – and oh, how sweet it is. Cooper and I are married. We have moved to Neptune Beach to die, and we have a modest house by the sea. Our daughter has brown hair like him, but was cursed with my thin upper lip, and our son is the spitting image of my little brother Chase, but with dark blonde hair. It is the future I will never live, the past I could never quite get my hands on, a glimpse of my final frame. And I am thankful.
Things spin backwards, and I am sucked into another hole in time. We were so happy. Oh, God, we were so happy. I see a hall full of photos of the life I never lived: I see graduations and birthday parties and retirement luncheons. I see oak trees and hugs and smiles and Polaroids of love. I see sunsets and vacations and fights and kisses under the Eiffel Tower in our twilight years, all the things that make up a human life well lived. Everyone should get Paris in June with the one they love. I see my scar in every photo, and I see Cooper loving me despite it. I weep with sorrow, but still, I am comforted by the fact that love was out there waiting for me, even if fate wrenched me away from it just as I was reaching out to grasp it. Love was waiting for me: I am so proud.
And then I see the blurred images I have glimpsed so many times in my Lovehall, but this time, they actually come together, morph into something real. I see Cooper kneeling at a casket in a room full of crying people – my first-ever sight of my own funeral. I want to tell them not to cry, that my soul has left the casket, that I have been set free from my flesh, that I am flying now, but I don’t even have a mouth. And as I watch with tears in my eyes, the room goes black, and it’s like there’s a spotlight on the coffin. All is quiet and peaceful. I see myself in the box, dead in a white dress. Then I see Cooper bend down to my face.
“You are so beautiful,” he whispers as he wipes the makeup off my scar, and I want so badly to reach out, to touch him, to tell him that I will end up okay and that he will live on to be a wise old man. “You still are. Please believe me this time.”
I freeze.
“I’m sorry, but I lied to you during our last night together,” he says. “When I said I would be your boyfriend forever, I didn’t mean it. I want to be your husband.” He reached into his pocket. “This is for you – and no pulling away this time,” he says, stuffing a ring onto my finger, as my soul watches in disbelief. A bouquet of pale-pink roses is placed atop my hands. “Please don’t be mad at me, but I just wanna make this thing official.”
I watch, shocked to silence. I want to run to him more than I have ever wanted anything. I want to break through, to tell him not to worry, that he will go on to win and lose and love, that he will one day brush the bangs out of his daughter’s eyes, a daughter he will love more than anything in the galaxy. A daughter whose name will be Summer.
“I know this isn’t your ideal wedding situation, but you look beautiful,” he says, and I am so overcome with love I want to cry. “And there is a bright side – no selfies will ever be posted of this ceremony.” He puts his hand on mine, and I swear to God that even after all these years, I can almost feel it. “I, Cooper Nichols, take you, Summer Johnson, in the presence of a God that may or may not exist, our family and our friends, to be mine. I offer you my solemn vow to love you unconditionally, to honor and respect you, to laugh with you and cry with you, and to cherish you for as long as we both shall…”
Oh my God, I think as he trails off. I am married. I am a married dead girl.
“Gotta kiss the bride, right?” he says as he places a kiss on my lifeless body. “Thank you for giving me something to believe in.”
And as he reaches down and slips a few things into my casket, I feel myself being yanked by the shoulder, and the scene suddenly disintegrates.
Time stops as the vortex returns. I was wrong all along. He fused us. He married me. Cooper married me. I had no idea. No wonder the connection remained so strong. No wonder I was kept around, a masochistic observer of the shell of a life: I am his wife. Why I was never given this image before, I do not know…the ring on my body, I thought was some sort of family token. I had no idea he married me…I had no idea. If the world fell away, if everything and all of this was for nothing, I would still go back to the beginning and choose him.
As I soar through time I see it all…pink roses in pale hands…a Funfetti cake in the background…all my family, all my friends, even my pastor…oh my God, Cooper married me.
Then the aura of the tube turns copper and golden, and I feel it – fate is showing me Cooper’s Lovehall, the story of his life. Everything I am shown makes instant sense to me somehow: I see sharks swimming in blue water, I see a father leaving, I see a little child being bullied for his weakness, I see that boy meeting a girl named Summer, I see that boy’s soul being strengthened and deepened by her death, I see a brunette woman coming into his life to incubate his talent until he is ready for the Muse…
My heavens. I was meant for him. History sent us straight for each other, collided us to create a supernova of art. We were no accident – we were a love for the ages. This thing was a classic.
But Lily had a purpose, too, and this realization lifts a universe of guilt from my soul. She was already broken when she was sent to Cooper to help him receive the Muse. They fixed each other as best they could, but still, they’d already found and lost the loves of their lives. They weren’t meant to be together – they were meant to collide.
I am crying hard as I sink down into the dream – Cooper’s dream, the one he is currently having on Earth, as an old man. And then I flip the switch, and his dream instantly stops, and refocuses on me. And I am about to see him again. Sure, this will be but a dream, but then again, life is but a dream. What’s the difference?
I slide into the dream. I have reached the orbit of Earth, and humanity. I hear another roaring sound, like riding the edge of the universe at sunset, and suddenly all is silent.
I open my brand new eyes. I am human again, in his dream at least. I am in our bedroom. Our marital bedroom, the one we never got. My slippers are by the bed. His dentures are soaking in solution on the bedside table. Pink roses are on a dresser. And our love lasted. This is the bliss I deserved. This is the life that was stolen from me. This is temporal, but still, I am so grateful for the glimpse of my intended forever.
I look at the bed, and here comes heaven. It is Cooper. My boy. He is the same, but so wonderfully different. I know I won’t have much time before I am ripped back to the grey area, so I want to make this count. I want to give him me, one final time, and teach him what he needs to know.
He opens his eyes. I am standing at the end of his bed, as we all do when our loved one is on the way towards death. But nobody has ever visited like this before. What is going on inside that beautiful head? Where has he been all these years? How, really, does he feel about me?
Slowly, he sits up and blinks. “Wha…who is it?”
I don’t have to say anything. He knows. My boy knows. He always knew. His eyes widen, and all at once, I feel it rush into him: the truth. I was invincible.
His face collapses into tears. He pushes himself out of bed and stumbles forward. He brushes past the walker beside his bed – he won’t need it now. Love has set him free, at least temporarily. Just as it did for me.
“Summer. Summer, Summer, Summer…Summer.” His body meets mine, and it is like the first day. “Oh, Summer. It’s you. Oh, God, it’s really you.”
He wraps his arms around me. Oh my God – my Cooper. We envelop in a hug that feels fifty years in the making, and I have never felt more alive. And suddenly I feel a wonderful breezy squirm in my stomach, a very human sensation I had totally forgotten about during my time as a soul: butterflies. I am alive, in love at least, and there has never been a greater existence in this world. I hug him for every hug I could never give him after my death, kiss him for every kiss I never gave him, love him for every ounce of love that was stolen from us by that doctor. And for the first time, I feel the security of the ring he gave me.
He can’t talk. He is crying too hard. But they are happy tears. Tears he has dreamed all his life to shed. I can feel that much of his heart now. He loved her, but he also loved me. We were two souls wrenched apart by fate, rejoined in love at last. This is victory, no matter what happened in between. Love is victory.
We are in part of the Confluence, and through the walls of our new dimension I see all sorts of couples rejoining, humans passing away and meeting their soul mates that have died before them. But not just romantic couples – I see mothers and daughters, grandsons and grandmothers, best friends and cousins and young lovers – all kinds of pairs that were wrenched apart by fate, now rejoining in death. No matter how they arrive, they all lose themselves once they see their loved one. They run together, kissing and hugging and crying, reunited at last. Many of them are old, like us, but some are barely teenagers, and some are even babies. And I have never felt warmer.
That’s when I realize how ignorant I’ve been. Your soul mate doesn’t have to be someone you loved romantically, and you don’t need to have had a romantic partner to find someone waiting for you on the other side. Actually, “romance” as I’d thought of it wasn’t even really romance: there was so much more than the meet-cute and the romp down the aisle. There could be so much romance in the way a grandmother proudly prepared breakfast for her young grandson, placing a flower on the table by the waffles, just because. Romance could lurk in the way a friend paced for hours in a waiting room during a best friend’s heart surgery, it could hide in the way a man headed straight for a crib in a sweltering orphanage, looked down at a pair of big, needy eyes, and said, “yes, that’s my daughter now.” Deep love was all around me, I’d just mostly ignored it in my quest for a soul mate. But now I knew the truth: any two souls could merge as one. Any two humans could form a love so strong, they would join together again after they both passed on. That was the nature of history. Of love. Of fate. Of us.
“I just want to hug you,” Cooper says, oblivious to all this with his human eyes, and his voice makes me so nervous I want to faint. “To feel you. Oh my God, my Summer.”
We collapse onto the bed together. Being weighed down by this temporary human body is both laborious and heavenly. I want to cry, but I tell myself to be strong – I’ve waited so long for this, and I can’t crumple now. So I just feel him. That is all I want, to feel him. “I promised you I’d find a way to come back,” I say as I touch him, “in that Saviour quote I left you all those years ago. Why didn’t you believe?”
He says nothing. An immense period of time seems to pass, and I just stare at him. I have waited so long for this. Finally he seems to accept that this is really happening, then looks around. “Jesus. Where are we?”
“I think this is the life we would’ve had. You know, if I didn’t die.”
He stares at me, the reality dawning. “Oh, my…no. This is too much.”
“I know.”
“Oh, God, what do I say?” He brushes my hair away, which I just now realize is a sandy grey. What a gift, to be old. “I can’t believe you’re here. I’ve felt so…bad for you. That you had to…leave me, and…”
“Do not feel bad,” I smile. “I am free. My life was difficult. I am simple now. I am love now. And I didn’t leave, not really.”
“What do you mean?”
I just smile at him. Where do I begin?
“It’s a long story,” I say, and he smiles. But then the clouds slide in again.
“God,” he says, “now that you’re here, it feels like it all happened yesterday. Your death tortured me. Rocked me. I had so many regrets about the way I let you leave, all the things I never told you, all the things I never did, all the things I let happen…”
“No, Cooper,” I say, touching his wrinkled arm. “If anything, I need to apologize to you. I am so sorry for leaving you high and dry like that.”
He holds me close. “You didn’t. I’ve been so warm.” He breathes. “Still…for so long I felt so lost, so…purposeless. Back in the beginning.”
I smile at him. He is a legend and he doesn’t even know it yet. “You were born for a reason, Cooper. You just don’t know it yet. But you will soon.”
He looks down at me. “What are you? You’re you, but you’re not…you.”
“I am love,” I say, mimicking my mother. Should I tell him everything? That I have been stalking him from on high for nearly fifty years? There has never been a more unsayable truth.
“Oh, don’t be sorry,” he says. “You really feel bad? My God…the love you gave me overpowered the grief, so strongly. I was lucky to get left by you,” he says as his voice descends into crooked sobs. I hold him and pat his hair, so thin and brittle compared to the golden mop of that roaring summer on the sea. He has changed, but he is still mine. It doesn’t matter if someone goes on after you and loves and wins and loses and hates again: once you imprint yourself onto their soul, they will never truly leave you, not really. This boy is mine. Everyone has one true wish. Mine was him, and this. Mine was to grow old with my boy. And even if I didn’t get to grow old with him, at least I am getting to be old with him, even if it’s only in a dream. I am grateful for that much.
“Where have you been?”
My God. Where would I even begin? What could I even say? That I’ve spent my second life trying to reach him, reaching out and trying to touch him, calling a phone line he never picked up?
Years ago, when I saw Cooper looking weathered and worried, I got a glimpse of what he would look like as an old man and decided that I would love him then, too. And I do. He is breathtaking.
“Watching,” I say. “And learning. And hiding, since your wife died.”
His face creases. “Lily? Did you see her? …Up there, I mean?”
I swallow, and it is a revelation to be able to do something like that. I also note that talking about Lily with him makes me so nervous for some reason. “No. I didn’t see her. I think she went somewhere else – somewhere you go when there is nothing else that can be done about your life.”
His shoulders fall. “Well…what does that mean?”
“You’ll learn, in time, I guess.”
“What did you learn up there?”
I smile. “Everything I never learned the first time around. Don’t be sad for me – I have been perfected.”
He looks down again. There is so much he does not understand, so much he is trying to process. And for a moment I almost feel bad for exposing him to all this. There is a reason all is not revealed until death, after all. The small, feeble human mind is not built to have the knowledge of the cosmos poured into it. They have a hard enough time dealing with what is right in front of them. They would buckle under the pressure of the truth.
“Oh my God…I love you,” he says, meeting my eyes. “Do you know how much I love you, present tense? I love you, Summer, and I love you as this ghost, or whatever you are, just as much as I did when we were young. Oh, my darling…”
I reach up and put a hand on his temple, which feels so different after so many seasons under the blistering sun. All the joy in the world rushes into my temporary body, and I wish more than anything to hold onto this moment forever, here on the edge of glory. “My God,” I say.
“What?”
I’m nervous, but I want to say it. I want to bathe in the glory of this. “It’s just that, for so long I thought you were depressed, burnt out. But you weren’t. You were holding a candle, in your own little way, weren’t you? You never let it go, did you?”
He holds my hand tighter, wrinkles to wrinkles, liver spots to liver spots. He smiles, shakes his head. “I never let it go.”
But then his tears fall faster. “But I still feel like I let you down. There were so many things I never did, so many words I never said, so many hugs I never gave you while you were alive…”
“Stop.” I kiss his cheek. “I felt your love, Cooper. Nobody could have ever asked for more.”
He wipes his weathered face. “But…is this real? Or am I just dreaming?”
I consider telling him the truth, the whole truth, but I know that would cause a big galactic mess I do not want to start. “It is a dream. Why would it not be real? And why are you ‘real’ when you are awake simply because you slap yourself on the arm and feel it? Do you not ‘feel’ during dreams, too? Whatever you choose to believe is real, that is reality. Live in it, whether you are asleep, awake, or anywhere in between.”
He looks down at whatever I am. “What can I do to keep you? I don’t want this to end.”
“It never ended in the first place. I know that now. Don’t worry about that. And what can you do? You can be there for the ones who are still here. You have no idea how much they still need you. You have no idea how important you are, and what a difference you can still make, every day you are still alive on this rock. Go and make change. Use your words to open the eyes of humans.”
“How?”
“I will be there to help. After all, I was always there. Every time you hugged someone I loved, I was there.”
“You were?”
I smile and give him the last paragraph of his book a little early. “Cooper, don’t think I’m gone because I died. Death is not what you think it is. It is simply the point at which the watched becomes the watchman. I am the love you feel on a Sunday morning, the thrill that jolts you at a loved one’s touch, the tingle on your neck as you step into a cemetery. There are so many things you do not understand, but the first and the last one is this: you are not alone. I am here, and I am never leaving. I know you don’t understand now, but you will one day. After all, you are human: you are not built to understand.”
He stares at me. “I don’t…I can’t…”
“But you can do things on your own, too,” I say. “Show them that there is more. You will write a book. It will show the world that there is so much more to a human story than what happens between the cradle and grave. They are so much more special and important and immortal than they know – show them.”
“But…how will I write this book? I haven’t exactly been productive lately…”
The Muse begins to activate, and it all comes into my head now. I insert the vision into his brain, and he gasps. One day very soon, the Muse will slam into him as he washes his hands on a humid morning, and his body will suddenly fill with electricity like an oak tree struck by lightning. He will hear voices in his head and he will see visions in his mind and he will sit down and start writing. He will receive all the inspiration that has eluded him his whole life. That is when the visits will begin.
What would you say if the world was listening? What would you want humanity to know? I want to pass on tolerance and spirit and compassion and kindness and more, so much more. Humanity is not alone. They were never alone. And I want them to know it. And I will show them. I am sending a book to Earth about two temporal humans sinking into eternal love over one tragic and blistering and breathtaking summer. This will be my contribution to a species. It will teach many humans that love is worth fighting for, and how precious humanity truly is. It will fall on many deaf ears, of course, and humans will, for the most part, continue to stumble blindly through the darkness. But it will make a difference in a few souls, and that is enough for me. A little compassion could go so far in this broken-down world, after all.
I will light the fire, and Cooper will start writing. And so many more stories will be relayed in the book, too, and be listed as “subplots.” The souls around me will jump for joy that a connection back to humanity has been established. They will run at me, not cheering, but screaming. They will crowd around the Muse and visit Cooper, one by one, taking turns down the rabbit hole to visit his brain and give their testimony, share all they know, pass on all the love they can. He will describe this period as an especially intense creative process, one that felt nearly heavenly in origin, but no one will believe him. But he will write. One woman will tell him a story to let her daughter Sarah know that she still remembers that day with the raincoat, and then one man will push her out of the way and shout stories in Cooper’s ear that will let his little brother know that he never left. Cooper will listen, he will write, and he will share. His soul will become illuminated with once-in-a-generation knowledge of the dead, and he will pass that on in the form of the book. His brain will be filled with the lessons of everyone who came before, and he will leave that information for all who will come after.
And the book will spread. A generation will read the book, and then the generation after that one, too, and all those people will feel a little less lonely and lost, here on this crowded and confused planet. He will help to break open a cynical world, bring together a human race that has been fractured and divided and pushed apart beyond recognition. This is the point of the artist: to make us feel a little less alone. Mozart, Shakespeare, Hemingway: it has always happened like this in the past, and it will always happen like this in the future. It is how this all works. Art is the universe extending an olive branch, tenderly rubbing us on the cheek to let us know someone out there is looking out for us. We are loved, and art is the proof. And art is not confined to humanity. The universe loves to create. Look at an image of a new galaxy, for example. The flow of the color, the sparkle of the stars, the swirl of the celestial gases – all this beauty is no accident. This is the cultivated art of the universe.
But books have always been my favorite. Books are so essential for humans, after all. Never has there been such an essential adventure for humans. No explorer has ever embarked upon a quest like stepping into the pages of a novel, living a thousand lives in three hundred pages. A person that does not read is like a ship that never leaves the harbor or a suitcase that never leaves the closet: what’s the point?
And then I see a vision of someone reading the book in five years, giving my life meaning. Her fiancé died in a motorcycle crash seven months before, and the cover of the book will strike her as she passes it in an airport. She will open the book on the plane and tears will spring to her eyes, not tears of heartbreak, but tears of overflow. Cooper will tell our story, but in just a vague enough way to let the reader look between the lines and insert their own stories into the big picture and identify with the pain. For the first time, this woman will feel the loss of her fiancé – feel it, with a capital F, not run from it and mute it and shove it into a cupboard, like she usually does. She will retreat somewhere, start crying, and finally allow herself to feel. Emotions will stir within her, emotions that she has suppressed for years, emotions that will say: I’ve been there. I know you. I have felt what you are feeling. And you will make it to the other side of this. Literature is the lifeline of a species. Learning the lessons is simply the first step – passing them on is the second. Words, either set to music or bound in the pages of a book, can heal and soothe and unite the chaotically quilted patchwork that is Earth. One book can make a hurting teen in Indonesia and a grieving widow in Bangladesh feel the same sense of hope, one song can bow the heads of a neglected housewife in Missouri and a homeless man in Lithuania and wash them in the same silent comfort. And Cooper is about to contribute to the artistic blueprint of humanity. His loss and grief and hopelessness were not felt in vain. He will do the most divine thing: he will put his pain on paper and create.
I tell Cooper all this and more. But what I do not tell him is that the Muse can only do so much – it provides the inspiration, but much of the equation is left up to the artists themselves, and their talent. That is why you have to be especially talented to receive the connection. But I have total faith in him – he will do spectacularly.
“It will open some eyes, but not all,” I finish. “Humans have always been stuck in the mud, and they always will be. But some can choose to believe. You will have the eyes and ears of the world, Cooper. Use them wisely. Make sure you write something worth saying. Write something you believe in.”
“But…but I need to know so much more,” he says. “This world is…garbage. How will I possibly be able to help anyone, or convince them of any of this?”
This makes me feel so hopeless. “Don’t believe the people who have no hope, who say the world is a lost cause,” I tell him. “Don’t. They say fools rush into love – I was so proud to be a fool for you. And I would gladly be that fool all over again, a million times over. There is good out there in the world, Cooper. Find it. Pass it on.”
“But how? They are so lost, so cynical…”
“Do you love me?” I ask, and even after all these years, I am nervous at his response.
“Yes,” he says, solemn. “Always. Forever.”
“Then take that love you feel for me and spread it as far and as wide as you can. Do it now. While you still can.”
He swallows. “But I can’t write. I haven’t really been able to since you died. That whole period of my life just…shattered my confidence, to be honest. That’s why I’ve only been working on short little pieces. A book seems impossible to me.”
I grip his arm. “You will do it, Cooper. You have all the words in you. Find them.”
He looks around again. “Oh, Jesus. How long do you have here?”
“Not long.”
“Who’s up there?” he asks, pointing at the ceiling, and the twinkling stars beyond it.
“Whoever you want to be.”
“Really? Is there a, a God, or some sort of…”
“There is love,” I smile. “Just imagine the possibilities of a world where love is the only thing that matters. All else will be revealed when the time comes. Do what you can on Earth until then.”
He sighs, looking almost nervous. “Did…did you miss me, you know, up there?”
And suddenly I feel nearly human again.
“I did,” I say. “Every day.”
“I just wanted you to be proud of me,” he says, crying.
“Oh, I was. I am. I always will be.”
“Why?”
“Oh, Cooper. You’ll never know how much I loved you.”
“Yes I will. I feel it every day.”
I take him by the face and take some time to think about this. It is the sweetest thing I have ever felt. “Ugh. Humans are so smart, and so naïve – you put one foot in front of the other after my departure wrecked you. Who could ever be more proud of anything? You kept swimming. And even in the middle of a nightmare, you kept dreaming. You are so brave.”
He processes this. “How were you able to come here again?”
“Everyone has one bone-deep wish. You were mine. And that wish remained, even when my bones were all that was left of me.”
“You’re mine, too.” We smile and hug. Oh, my boy is so much better the second time around. “And so, since you’re here,” he asks, confused again, “does that mean…am I dead?”
“Oh, it does, but not in any way you understand yet. But no, you have more time on Earth.”
“When I do…die, will I return to you?”
I rub his neck, suddenly fearful. “Oh, Cooper. There is no way to be sure. I hope so.”
He closes his eyes. “I can’t process this. There are so many things I wanted to tell you…I felt so guilty for being happy sometimes. I couldn’t fix the grief, so I just carried it. You weren’t there, you would never experience happiness again, and sometimes I felt like…like I owed it to you to be miserable.”
I point at his chest. “I left love in you, Cooper. Therefore I was alive in you. You weren’t betraying me, you were taking me on the adventure of my afterlife. I got to live a thousand lifetimes watching you. I felt every moment of triumph, knew about every ounce of misery. And I want you to feel more. It is not too late.”
“Why didn’t you just show yourself, then, if you were there?”
“That is not the question. The question is, why did you let your brain deny what your heart knew to be true?”
Slowly, his face melts into a smile. “Yes. I did know. Oh God, I knew. When my son was born-”
“Charlie,” I interrupt. “I know. I send him my best.”
“…You know Charlie?”
“I do. I was there, when he was born. I broke through. I lifted the umbilical chord off his neck.”
He just stares for a moment, tears in his eyes. “I knew it. I knew it! I swear I felt you smiling that day. I felt you so many times. But I never let it in…I never let it hit me.”
I hold him close for all the moments I never could. “Oh, Cooper. It was me.”
“Good God. So what now?”
I watch him and think about his question. I want to know what old age feels like, too. Every grey hair is a gift I will never get to fret over and yank out of my skull. Every wrinkle is something I pray for the chance to overpay a dermatologist to erase from my face. Aging is the ultimate victory, because it means you got the chance to stay, even if you fucked it all up. But I will never get the opportunity to grow old and saggy and make mistakes.
But I guess I am different, too, I realize. I am not what I left behind when I died. I am wise. I am empathetic. I am filled with knowledge that only the departed can truly ever learn. Growing into your body is one thing – growing into your soul is a different thing altogether. It just took two lives for me to learn that instead of one.
And this is what I want: I want to watch my boy run a comb through silver hair.
“What now? We do what I was meant to do,” I tell him. “Be old with you. Be in love with you. In the flesh.”
He rises, and we go through the motions. We do all the things I never got to do in my second life, which for some reason I crave. You do not question things, here in the innermost realm of your dreams. You just love.
We brush our gums together, and I help insert his dentures. I help him piece his toupee onto his head, and slide on his leather shoes. And this is triumph. I have won, if only for a moment. Our love lasted until the golden years, roared into his twilight time, even if it was only from the other side. Of this I am so proud. It makes sense to me that I would have subconsciously craved a normal morning with him, because I find beauty in banality. So much gorgeous love can be found in a wooden swing on a Sunday morning, let me tell you.
I help him dress, and we step in front of the mirror. I stare at his wrinkles, and he stares at my long, silver-blonde hair. There is nothing more victorious, the chance to run a comb through silver hair with your one twin soul. It doesn’t matter that we aren’t young and tanned, with plump cheeks and bright eyes. This romance is just as pure in our golden years, with our papery skin and stooped posture. I got to grow old with him, too, in a way – a soul grew wise from above while watching a boy grow old and white-haired down below. We were fused in his coffin-side ceremony, and in that union, I got the ride of a too-short lifetime.
He looks at me, and all over again I am reminded of how wonderful it feels just to have someone look at you like you are something worth looking at. I whip my hand in the air, a silver whisper of a movement. A blank diary is now sitting on Cooper’s kitchen table. My tanned god of so many seasons ago, now old and frail and on his last leg, cherished today more than ever, turns and spots it there.
“But what…”
“That will be there in the morning. Sketch out your ideas in it. Now hold on. Just watch.”
Before he can finish I wave my arm again, and we are on the pier with our young selves, on the last night of my Earthly life. The young versions of ourselves are sitting by that bench, talking about love and life and fate and fear. I smile at myself as the tears come. There was so much I had to learn, so much I thought I knew. But I was loved, and that was all that really mattered. The water is glowing beneath us.
He looks from Us, past tense, to Us, present tense. “My God – you’re watching. You really were always here. I’m almost…scared to know that. Warm all over, but scared, too. Is that okay?”
“Fear is only natural. And I don’t regret any of it. Watching you as some powerless observer was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but if I had to go back and die again and watch you live your life all over again, I would go back to that operating room in a second.” I touch my heart. “You were the most magnificent adventure I have ever known, Cooper.”
“What now?” he asks, crying.
“Now we dance, of course. What else?”
He nods, but this time, he is the one taking the lead. He reaches for my hand, and slowly, we start to dance. One of our songs from that summer starts playing in the wind, the eerily beautiful strings dancing over the dark waves like electric spiders:
I was thinking back today, back to when our days were golden
Back to when we were young and free, so emboldened
Running those grimy streets of town, you were King and I was Queen
Nobody could fuck with those crowns of thorns, babe, royalty
But where did you go? Where are you now?
I’m still that girl, just older now
Just know that if you wanted me there
I’d run, run, run until I found you, I swear
Now all I see is this dying day, time flying by
Running out, flashing gold up in the sky
But will you love me in my December as you did in my July?
And would you still come to me now that I’m no longer flying high?
(Run, run, run, I swear)
I lean my head against his chest and breathe in his scent, still summery after all these years. I can’t believe it: I can’t believe we found our way back to each other. I can’t believe he still wanted me around. The fire never burned out. I had no idea the universe fought so hard for our souls to be together. I didn’t fade away after I died: I was Cooper's last best girl. His first and greatest heartbreak; a summer legend in his soul. I remained, and I am so grateful.
And this, I realize as we dance, is another thing I have come back down to Earth for: to be cherished. Because nobody ever treated me like this. Nobody ever gave me this much love. All people ever did was make fun of my scar and my feeding tube and call me names and gawk at me and shun me. I’ve come back to slip into the temporary heaven that Cooper, this beautiful sweet man, gave me at the end of my life on Earth.
And soon I feel something I have not felt in decades: I feel catharsis.
As he leans me back, I realize I cannot wait for what lies beyond. Life was only the first adventure. What’s next?
An immeasurable amount of time passes. We dance, quite literally, the night away, two people in love again on the edge of the world. I have never been more in love, actually. I tell him all the times I inserted my hand into his life, all the times I helped. He sobs uncontrollably many times, and my wedding dress becomes wet with tears.
“It was me,” I whisper. “It was always me.”
Finally, he fully breaks down and lets it all in. “Oh, Summer…I knew it, I knew it, why did I deny it…”
“It’s okay. It is how this all works. If you knew I was around, it would mess with the balance.”
“The balance?”
I hesitate. I’ve already broken enough rules. “You’ll find out when you get up here,” I say. “But I know now that I was given a hard time on Earth, with my scar and my stomach issues, to prepare me to help from up there. To give me empathy and a giving heart. God knows the humans needed the help. Most people thought my destiny had been cut short at my death. That is really only where it began. I was born on an operating table at Baptist Downtown. I just didn’t know it then. I was sent back in my second life to use my knowledge to help the humans.”
“Up where?”
I feel something pulling me, and I know the time is coming. I will tell him the rest through the Muse – right now I just want to enjoy him while I can.
“You will know soon. Now I go back to the stars.”
“Why?”
“I must.”
He swallows. “Will…will I be there soon?”
“Yes. You will meet me there, just as you predicted so long ago. …Or so I hope.”
“How will I be able to see you until then, when I want to talk to you?”
“Look at the ocean,” I say. “I am the waves. You don’t always hear me or pay attention to me, but I am always there.”
I share everything I can. About the Confluence, about what will happen – I don’t want my precious boy to be scared.
“See you soon, Cooper,” I say when time starts pulling at me. “Until then, get to work. Pass on what we learned and discovered and lost. Humanity needs our story.”
He’s crying, and he looks ashamed of it. After all, society tells men not to be soft, when in reality they can rise the highest when they let themselves break. “Don’t go, Summer. I need you here.”
“I must go,” I say. “Fate has written it. But put me in a book. Remember me. Honor me. Fate will take care of the rest.”
“But how am I going to write this book if you’re gone? How will I believe in this dream?”
I breathe, and it is like being born all over again. I am an immortal Summer. “Just believe that I am here, and that I am helping you. There are things I never said, things that need to be sent out into the world. What is humanity if not making a series of mistakes and then passing on the lessons to the next ones to come along on the conveyor belt of time, making this road a little less bumpy? Trust that love remains. I didn’t have to live forever to leave love behind. Did those oil-stained Jax Beach streets disappear because I did? Did your feelings for me cease to exist because my body returned to dust? You have all the love, Cooper. It’s in you. Never let it go. Push it forward. And as for me: I will see you soon. You are mine tomorrow. Now go write. Go make my bones shake, just like I told you all those years ago.”
He looks down. My beautiful boy, now my strong man, my husband, cries for me. “But you still don’t understand. After you died, the words left. I couldn’t write anymore. It all went blank.”
“And I’m so sorry for that,” I say. “But I’m sending them back. It was my destiny. You kept me alive even when I was dead, and I’ll never forget it. I’ll see you again. I know it.”
I turn.
“Wait. Don’t leave yet. You need to know something else.”
“Yes?”
He points at my ring finger. For the first time, his grandmother’s ring sparkles there. “That wedding you wanted…you got it. I gave it to you.”
And I fully break. “Oh, Cooper. I know now. I just wish I could’ve been there.”
He closes his eyes and brings my hand to his chest. “You were. I believe now. And promise me you’ll think of me up there?”
“Oh, Cooper – you don’t even have to ask.”
As I stare at him, his eyes snap open again. “But wait. Will I believe this dream when I wake up? How can I know that I won’t just shake my head and tell myself it was all just a silly vision, write it off as nothing?”
I smile with all the wisdom and all the confusion of a clueless and wise species living on the far edge of a simple and varied universe. Tonight is not enough, and I will see him again. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” I smile. “Give ‘em hell, Coop.”
The horizon blurs, and then melts away, and suddenly I am soaring. But before I leave for good, I am positive I hear Cooper whisper two parting words into the summer wind:
“Float on.”
Time and space bend and bleed together as I exit his dream and he slips back into deep sleep. I was right. All along, and despite my worst fears, I was right. Cooper was my End Love. Anyone can fall in love down on Earth. Humans, although misguided, are capable of tremendous amounts of goodness and affection. But when that love withstands the barrage of time, when it rises into the sky, into the universe, and fuses with the ancient energy of the cosmos and suddenly becomes physical and tangible and immortal and something that shines, something that enters the pantheon of the heavens – that is true love. That is historic love. That is Summer and Cooper love. And that is why humans call them “soul mates:” they know enough, even in their ignorance, to know that when love like that rushes in, two souls merge and combine into one entity. Forever. Life on Earth is simply a chance for twin souls to bump into each other and combine, surge together. When that happens, the world opens up. Why do you think elderly couples often die together? They are fused in love for good. When one light burns out, the other extinguishes in the winds of eternity, too. When the sunset comes and it is time to mosey on, soul mates do not wait. One leaves, and there is no choice but to follow. They rush into the next world together, two as one, just as it always should’ve been.
I was just as blind as the humans, up here where I thought I could see. I was so closed-up to the truth, so ignorant of what was right in front of me, so damned unsure of myself, as always. I’ve been passing judgment from my soapbox for decades, but this time, the one that missed the message was me. Cooper was the love of my life and my death. I was just too insecure to see it.
I am pulled up, and then through, and I know I am being prepared to leave the Earth for the very last time. And I do not fight. I know I will have to let go soon. I cannot keep doing this, inserting myself into the world through my observation of it. I have to let go of the life I will never have. Destiny pushed me here, to ride up on the winds of humanity and meddle from above. But I have done enough. It is time to leave my hard-earned lessons behind, pass on my knowledge, and take my chances. There is a place I can go for a while, a place that is beyond the grey area but not entirely Beyond, and so that’s what I decide to do. But first, before I leave Earth, I know there is somewhere I have to go. Something I have to do. A set of bones I have to visit one last time. Because as much as our lives and fates are spurred by other people, the relationship we have with ourselves will always trump the rest. It took me not having a self to learn that loving myself was the most important thing of all. Learning to love yourself in a world that is out to get you: this is the triumph of a species. What a colossal mistake, for any soul to assume they are any less precious than all the gems in all the mountains in all the solar systems of the universe. Only when they contain love on the inside can they send it out to the world at large. I got so lost in the day-to-day business of just trying to get by that I forgot that I helped, I contributed to humanity, I was a good soul, too, a soul that was loved. My mother was right. The world threw its worst at me, and still I rose. Not even death could bring me down. I was my own savior, up here where I thought I was doomed. I had the summer in me all along: I was invincible in love.
I soar over a sleeping Jacksonville Beach. The gates rise from the mist. And I am ready to see her.