8
The next day a school bus full of children in Nicaragua is knocked off a mountain road by a mudslide, and the cosmos is heavy with the tragedy of little souls bubbling up to their new home in the grey area, one by one. It is a decadent sadness, though, because even though their Earthly time has been cut short, they will never grow old – they will remain young and pure and beautiful forever. This universe smiles upon joy and frowns upon tragedy, and that is apparent every day. So to escape the doom I visit my Lovehall. God knows I need it. I have got to be reminded of the goodness I left behind before the blackness swamps me.
Lovehall is not just any place. It is the place where good things are stored. Your good things – the good deeds of your life. Like love and happiness and contentment and all the other things that lie on the other side of fear. Every ounce of goodness you spread, every kind word you ever uttered, every drop of love you spilled into the pool of humanity, is recorded and stored here. Because some love never fades – if anything it rises, crystallizing time to become your living history, the log of your time spent walking lightly on the ruined surface of our very ancient Earth. God knows I need the positivity, so I couldn’t resist a visit today. I wanted to see my paradise.
Humans know enough to know that treasure awaits them on the other side. And it does – I’ve seen your treasure, actually. But it is not what you think it is. There are no sporty cars or closets full of high heels or mounds of gold. Your treasure is different, you just don’t know it yet. You will not know until you realize what matters. Your treasure is love, in the form of memories. It is a lazy Saturday morning with your child when they were young, playing with tablet computers on the bed as rain pitter-pattered on the windowsills. It is building a tent on the living room floor with your father. It is a sloppy moment on the carpet with your first childhood dog, the very first one you fell in love with, the one that showed you what love was. It is a smile from a passing stranger on the street that lifted your day higher. It is your first kiss.
Love is a force brighter and more powerful than the largest sun in the universe. It is humanity’s highest calling. I know humans do not understand or grasp this power, but they will one day. After all, historically speaking, it takes time for them to come to terms with some concepts. Take gravity, for example. Even after some brilliant minds started showing proof of its existence, early humans didn’t want to believe in it because they couldn’t see it. It is that whole “could Earth really be round?” scenario: to tell a human back then, before science and technology and modern knowledge, that their feet were planted to the Earth because of an invisible force they could not see or hear or even really feel? Nonsense. They are mostly faithless by nature, and they like to believe what is in front of them, nothing more. It took humans thousands of years to believe in such an invisible, ever-present force as gravity – such is love. It will be known one day, though, so I do not worry. We linger in the love we leave behind, and that power can protect our loved ones and sweep them forward in ways they will never grasp, throw them toward fate in manners they will never even recognize. But we are gravity. We are always here, even when you cannot feel us. Even when you deny us.
We come to Lovehall whenever we are Lifesick and miss being human. Lovehall is all the warm memories you left behind, full of all the people you can’t be with anymore. It is love, distilled. You will come, you will watch, you will cry, and you will know you made a difference, however short your life may have been. You will love. Because if you make just one person happy during your life, it is considered a success in the grand scheme of the universe. If you think no tally is being kept, if you think no record of your actions exists out there, think again. We will all have to answer one day. It is the nature of the universe. And if you are worried about someone who is close to death, stop. If your affection for them speaks in any way to who they were on Earth, they will have a hall full of love waiting for them when they get here. I will give them a hug for you, too. I swear it.
Your love is stored in something called Mementos, which usually take the form of something you held dear as a human. I used to love going to Mam’s house, and I always admired this beautiful golden pocket watch hanging within a glass case on a marble base in her bedroom. Therefore, the scenes of all the love in my life play to me in the faces of watches. (I haven’t seen my grandfather in the grey area, as he lived long and passed before me, and I suspect he finished enough business to Ascend. I will miss him always, though. And I pray he has some company in the form of a blonde-haired woman I knew very well.)
I touch my first timepiece and am shown my first scene. It is me, with a little neighbor. We are children, playing on the trampoline in my backyard. Actually, she is playing and I am panting on the ground because my stomach tube is hurting, but I don’t focus on this. Because the funny thing is, my childhood was completely normal, lived out on average streets in an average town, but I still look back on it in wonder. And again I marvel at the grandiosity, the beauty, the awe of being a child.
I lean down and give myself a hug. I want to tell myself that I’ll end up okay, even if I’m dead. Little Me notices, looks up, and shivers a little. And suddenly I remember. I remember this day, and feeling a comfort I couldn’t explain or describe. And it was all because of me, visiting from the future. I almost get chills, even though I have no epidermis. I knew we visited the pasts of our loved ones – I had no idea we visited ourselves in our own pasts, too. We are our own biggest champions: what a dream.
Then the scene changes, and I see myself at eleven. All my friends have fallen away, as they usually do as innocence hardens and children turn into preteens and realize someone is “different” from them. I have a bad scar, and it makes me Other. But I am trying to find strength in myself. This will prove difficult: a Burn Book has been passed around school, where cruel little children who don’t know better write down mean things about classmates. Each page of the book was full of phrases like “Lilli Jankewitz: fat legs!!!” and “Corey Elderman: walks like a girl.” I saw my own page over a popular girl’s shoulder in typing class. I remember being terrified, but I didn’t need to be: my page was blank except for a small inscription at the bottom that said “Don’t know her. She’s quiet. Puts 2 much makeup on her scar.”
I remember a chasm opening up in chest as I read this, something flinching open very quickly and then shutting again, and then wanting to melt into the walls and disappear forever. Oh, I was so much more than my stupid scar. There was so much of me the world ignored, so many mountains within me they didn’t want to look at, or even acknowledge. You know how you can see out from within a darkened window, but nobody on the outside can see you? That’s how I was. I just watched. Nobody knew what happened inside. I wasn’t even popular enough to be hated. I was worse than ridiculed: I was just invisible.
After class, though, after the book had been confiscated and placed on the teacher’s desk, I watched her go to the break room, and then I stole it. I flipped to my page with tears in my eyes and wrote “Summer: cool girl, besides the scar thing. I heard she’s nice and has a cool backyard w/ a trampoline. She’s always open 4 sleepovers, by the way!!!!”
Nobody ever came for a sleepover.
I remember walking home that day and praying to God for a friend. Not a boyfriend to rescue me on a white horse, just a friend. All I wanted was to have someone on my team. And nobody was, all because of the way I looked.
Up here, today, I feel no anger about this scene – just pity. Not for me, but for those kids. Now I know that there is nothing but to forgive, and I wish I could tell everyone this, all the Unliving I knew and even the ones I didn’t, but I can’t. Some things they must discover on their own.
Next I see my brother. My memories of my family have a strange sepia quality, like I’m looking into a dream, but still I can see everything completely – and that murders me. And, oh, Chase: I miss him so much. I can’t even recall which night this was, just another quiet evening we’d spend in the kitchen, doing his homework together, bathed in comfortable silence. Little moments often contain the biggest love, the kind that bubbles, and this night positively pulsed with it. And as I watch us in my memory, I break through to smile and rub his head, even though this is years in the past. Sending love is free.
Then I see a scene of Cooper. He is a little curly-haired blonde boy near a dock, fishing with his father. I love him as a child just as much as I love him now. He is so easy to love, and always was. And I can sense it: in this scene, he is being prepared. For a fight. But what fight?
Time swirls and pushes me on. The blonde boy’s hair is darker, and there is a girl beside him. Me. And he is torn up inside.
We’re on the beach, just before a big Florida summer storm. He touches my forehead, runs a finger along my thigh, as goose bumps bloom on my chest. Up here, I begin screaming and crying at the memory. I cannot handle watching this anymore, being a ghost in the midst of the memories of my life. I reach out and want so badly to touch him, but nothing happens. I am choked by the urge to hug him, to smell his oceanic smell. But I’m gone.
The scene changes. I see dark shadows moving together on a hot, windy night. We are making love, and it plunges me into sadness. That boy was so tender with me, and all I did was murder his spirit.
Oh, Lord. I was blind but now I see. I had a working set of eyes, alright, I just wasn’t using them. So I close the memory and save it for later. I have got to get better at this. And I will. But it is simply too hard right now.
I try to leave my Lovehall, but something keeps me. Fate wants me to see something else, one last vision, so I stick around. And the last scene is most striking, drenched in the most emotion. But it is not something I can exactly see – it is a vague outline of a scene, smoke whirling in a bottle, fog obscuring the sea. Cooper is kneeling, slipping a ring onto someone. What is this? Will he marry someone while she sleeps? And why wouldn’t I be able to see?
Another idea comes to me. I grip a pocket watch and close my eyes. “Is Cooper a Chosen One?” I ask. I wait, and soon three letters rise to the golden surface of the watch’s case:
YES
I head back to my home as a sun implodes in some solar system still unknown to humans, thinking about all the people who came and left and died and moved on before me. And I feel eternally grateful that my tale is not done yet. We have been picked out of the crowd. Cooper has no idea now, but he has a plan. A purpose. And so do I, up here. I am now his shepherd. It has been made my job to see him through. I will send him the Muse – it has been written. And so I soar into the sky and continue this bizarre and breathtaking journey called my afterworld.