27
I sit on the edge of an imploding galaxy, alone, as always. But it doesn’t matter anymore. The day for me to stop caring has come.
I am nearing the end of my story. The final page of my journey has arrived. There is nothing else for me to do, no one left for me to watch. Because, finally, the Muse has called on me to send the connection to Cooper. All the generational art has been created, all the messages have been left behind, and the Muse is ready and waiting for Cooper. All I have to do is say when. He will take everything he has learned over his life, put it into the book, and die. It took far too long, but he is ready. I hope.
Undone by the scene at the hospital, I visited another one recently, this one in Alabama. The man sitting at the bedside of the woman wearing the respirator had been sitting there for seven years. She’d slipped into a coma after birthing a healthy baby daughter, and she had not woken up since. The most heartbreaking thing for the man was that he was still in love with her, and that he had to watch their daughter grow up without his soul mate by his side. So he sat there and rubbed his wife’s palm whenever he could, long after the doctors told him that her recovery was not a feasible option. He would not take no for an answer. He was going to walk his daughter down the aisle with his wife sitting in the front row one day, and nothing else would be discussed.
Now, I couldn’t meddle with death directly. But this woman wasn’t dead. So I meddled.
The man went to the restroom, figuring there was no reason to stare at her for yet another hour. Then he walked back in, struck by some strange sensation.
He looked down at his wife.
She opened her eyes.
But still, I am growing tired of this. There is only so much I can do. I am preparing myself to move on, too, once I establish the Muse. I will not be able to sit around and watch, see what flows from him. I am running on borrowed time. So yesterday I went down to Earth, to Cooper, my infinite misery, and that’s when it all went to hell. That’s when I saw Cooper writing. On his own. Without the Muse.
Just as the sun is meant to breach the edge of the ocean every morning, I was meant to meet you. Every wave before you was just a countdown to our union. Meeting you was like getting reacquainted with an old friend I never even knew I’d lost – you jumped out of my past and rearranged my future, and I’m grateful for the disruption.
And I know I act strong. I know I act like I don’t need you anymore. But I just want you to know that every night, when the lights go out, I close my eyes and run to you.
And then he wrote the thing that tore into me and made me regret every second of the past forty-something years: to Lily.
~
The universe, or at least the universe surrounding the Earth, is angry today. A war has broken out in the middle of the east, electric birds rising from the sky to wreak havoc on the land, and the in-between is heavy with innocent souls who were caught in the fire. A dark cloud descended on my town, but rain will not fall today – the cloud will breathe fire onto the ground, just as in the world below, scorching all it can and directing a punishing glow at my home. Because as much as the afteruniverse celebrates goodness – take a look at any nun’s Lovehall for proof – it shakes its finger at evil and wrongdoing. I saw the souls around me evacuating en masse to a differing plane of existence, popping and disappearing and soaring away to escape the flames, a mass exodus of former humanity…and all the activity is giving me ideas. Because nothing and nobody is fuming as much as I am today.
I watch the storm and think about fate. There is a point to every human life. I know that much by now. I have seen stillborn human babies in my second life who told me that they, even in their miniscule lives, were sent to Earth for just a moment to teach their parents more than any Oxford course could ever hope to communicate. It does not make sense down there, but it does up here. But what about second lives? Cooper’s love note has blasted open any semblance of faith I had. What is the point of my afterlife? Why am I still here? STILL? Why have I been kept here, a prisoner within my own soul? I am nothing but the whisper of a lost girl who never got to grow up, as frozen in my second life as I was in my first. What is the point of the ghost of me, besides to watch and pace and bite my lip and care about people who never cared about me, just as I did while wrapped in flesh? I thought I was being kept around to securely send the Muse to Cooper, and now that’s all up in the air, too. What if he writes the book about her instead?
I remember a poem Cooper wrote me forty years ago. I hope you love. I hope you dream. I hope you fly. And when you die, I hope your love follows you into the sky.
What a liar. He was no better than some player spitting charm to some impressionable drunk girl in a bar. I cannot do this anymore. I thought Cooper was my End Love, but my confidence has been washed away. Not only did he marry someone else while I sat up here, horrified, empty as space itself, but he is now writing about that love. In so many ways, I am still that twenty-four-year-old who left her body behind in a chilly hospital. I thought I’d changed, I thought I’d grown wise, but it wasn’t enough. I am unmoored, and everyone has left me. Where do you go for comfort when everyone is gone and all has fallen into the seas of time? I can’t rise from this. I read the signals wrong, he is in love with another ghost, and every second of it is like being hit by falling stars all day, all eternity. I should’ve left when I had the chance, at the Confluence, all those years ago.
Because now I know the truth. Cooper is done. He achieved what I couldn’t, and I am swamped with jealousy. He has created love and left it behind. In Lily, in his children, in his two grandchildren, in Chase. Oh, God, I miss them all so much I cannot even find the words in any human language I know. I would give anything for one last kiss. I would do anything to clutch them by the shoulders and tell them to let go of me. I would give all I ever had just to be alive one more day and share everything I knew about what they were doing wrong, and everything they could do to get back on the right track, and how beautifully I thought they were doing despite all that, and how immensely proud I am of them all. I even want to tell them I am here, that I will never leave, that I never left to begin with. They are not alone. And they never knew it. Not really.
I stare out at the dust and think about the Earth, this marvelous place that humans care nothing about. This mess. This wrecked-up world where dead girls have to watch their boyfriends and families and friends move on without them. And humans: so lost in the fog of their fear, so intent on gaining accomplishments that might outlast their bodies. Why are they so stupid? None of that matters. There is a girl who still loves a ghost from a summer almost fifty seasons ago, and nobody in the world cares. I am so alone.
I see the light rising, and I know what it means. It is the Confluence. My work is mostly done, and I could probably go if I wanted to. I could move on. God knows I need to. I need to let him go. I need to stop this. I need to let him have a life while he still can. This is pointless. I am pointless. I am in love with someone who can’t even see me. I am nothing.
This is it. I have to choose: leave, or stay. So I go somewhere to think. The stars open up, and I am out of there.
I spend a brief forever somewhere in Andromeda. Humans know this massive blue star as Vega; I just call it my relaxing room. I come out here sometimes just to float and watch. But this time, I might be watching for the last time. And I savor the view all I can.
I cannot exactly travel through time, but in a sense I can – I simply access the thoughts and emotions and fears and experiences of the billions of humans who Ascended before me, and jump through the ages that way. These souls leave a sort of memory log when they pass through, and I tap into those memories like a computer reading a database. This is how I can sit on the edge of time and dangle my feet into all the glory and all the disaster and all the triumph humans are capable of. One day I stand on the roof of a Munich state building and watch the Nazi party march by in a fantastical parade of power, all too privy to what would befall the mesmerized crowd in only a few years’ time. The next day I sit on a cliff overlooking the smoggy Chinese countryside and watch the birth of an empire, hover over the Nile and watch thousands of slaves muscle the building blocks of the Great Pyramids into place, stand on the beach and watch the roaring rockets of Mercury and Apollo lift into the sky from the marshy Florida wetlands, giving humanity its first view of Earth from outside Earth, hide in the electric streets of 1980s London and watch a teenager named Diana Spencer exit a limousine at a cathedral in a cloud of organza and be swept irrevocably forward into history as the crowds roared. This is the immortal art of humanity, these images left behind, this flipbook of glory. I love to watch, and the fact that it might be ending is undoing me.
If only the humans could stop looking for magic in the stars and the universe and the dark arts and realize they were already spinning it themselves. Humanity is the most potent magic the universe has ever bottled. The Big Bang had nothing on a little girl walking proudly into her house from the hospital with her new baby sister in tow, no black hole could ever overpower the glory of an old man taking his wife’s papery hand and singing to her while she died. Humans are such an interesting kind, capable of transcending their fragile bodies and achieving feats so far beyond what was initially expected of them. There are others out there, of course, just as there have been and will always be others, in different modes of both time and dimension, but I don’t know much about them. I don’t even care, really. Not when there is humanity to watch. I have seen it all, and still I know that humans are special. Oh, what unspeakable beauty, and what otherworldly horror, these creatures are capable of creating when they want to.
And, okay, fine, I’ll admit it: I love Cooper. All love stories are about two living humans, but really, that was only chapter one of the tale. I love him as a spirit more than I ever could have as a human – in fact, I love him today, even as the old and sick and decaying man that he is, more than ever before. Watching him live the life of a kind and strong and wounded man deepened everything I ever felt by miles. My soul radiates with overflowing love for a man I loved as a girl decades ago. I didn’t even know the meaning of the word “love” until I looked at it through the prism of death, actually. I had no idea. This love I have for him is timeless and elegant and eternal – unkillable. Whoever said “happily ever after” just didn’t understand what “ever after” meant. It is only half of the story.
And all at once, it hits me: I love Cooper Nichols. And this is my one last truth. Humans are but one species on the edge of an impossibly crowded and dazzling universe and all of it is useless and I am dead and I love Cooper Nichols. Neither sickness nor death nor the knowledge of the ultimate futility of the human cause could get in the way of my love for him, and at the end of it all, when the stars implode and the galaxies collapse and all returns to the darkness of the beginning, this one truth will cling to the dusty remains of all we were and all we weren’t and all we could have been: I love Cooper Nichols, and really, that is enough for me.
But I need to know this: does he still love me? Really? Or was he always just sinking in the ghost of me? Will I be his ultimate demise, or his final savior?
I try to stop the train of thought, but I cannot. Soon it runs away, filling the galaxy around me. Before I leave the grey area, I need to know. I need to know why I have been drug across the glass surface of time, watching everyone I know live and love and succeed, besides myself. One day he mourns me, the next he is consumed by her. And I am so jealous. I am a lab rat of fate, and I cannot do this anymore. If Cooper is going to die and return to Lily, why not just send me off? Why do I have to watch all this? I want answers. Now.
Furiously, I soar to the Dreamskipping room, where the Muse is sent down. A soul is present but I banish them. I am powerful and angry and I want closure on a life that never really ended. I want to feel my power, I want to own my majesty. So I summon the Muse and wait.
A sound hits my world, then grows louder. The vortex arrives on a heavenly sunrise, and I know I will be able to hide in all this madness from the war and slip into the void unnoticed. Because I need the truth. And I can do this, after all. I can bend the rules. I want one more moment with him. One more kiss. One more dream. What’s the difference from all the other dreams?
And as a far-off cosmos is hit by a cloud of flames from Earth’s fury and slowly collapses into a black hole, the wind whipping at my side all the while, suddenly my whole world roars with one question: what if I am not done yet? What if I could write one last ending? What if I could watch one final frame of the life I should’ve gotten?
I could…
I should…
And I will.
Flames rise. Worlds fall away. And I decide.
I shiver with heavenly and earthly purpose as I fill with strength. I will go Dreamskipping, but this time, I will not just watch. The Dreamskipping room isn’t just going to bring down an observer: it will bring down a participant. It is going to bring down Summer Johnson. Because the rules said I couldn’t come back to Earth as a human – they never said I couldn’t return in a dream.
I am coming back.