I felt… graceful. I was mesmerized, unmoored by weight or direction, held to attention by a thread along which I slid, dripping in the essence of miraculousness. It pervaded me too, a feeling language is too clumsy to approximate. It is a sense of being, fully, undistracted and undistorted. That is how it feels to have died.

Under this spell, I tumbled through the sludge of my history, treating it as happenstance. Aloof to the trials of my former family, I did not at first realize that the order of my life was confused. Mere glimpses served as hors d’oeuvres: a field at dusk, a car’s backseat window, steam lilting off a pizza box in the rain.

Faces appeared, crudely and intimately reconstructed, shifting and changing irrespective of time, several souls often populating the same frame. The bully who once taunted me shared space with the despot boss; many crushes flickered within a single wistful countenance. Few appeared more than once; the pale, kindly smile of my mother, and my father’s sturdy gaze, featured extensively.

As said, I was mostly apathetic to them, instead occupied with following the delirium of the thread. Nonetheless, their presence was clearly purposeful, and the thread deigned not to remove them from me, or vice versa. In the hope that it would expedite my departure, I began to piece together my former life.

I must have been young when I died, judging by the scarce throes of adulthood woven into the story. Taking precedence were domestic scenes from varying heights and the lethargy of academia.

I quickly noticed that memories were separable into two categories, which I named scenic and occurrent. Scenic memories recreated actual events and included specific characters. Occurrent memories were less strictly defined; they could be any occurrence which I had witnessed enough times for it to become engrained in me. It could be a handshake, or the wind shaking the trees, or a stare at a crush I was too sheepish to approach. A strange phenomenon accompanied occurent memories, whereby disparate faces and movements existed in unison.

In a way, the most useful aspect of my memory was its fogginess. Most of a scene’s faces were blurred or hidden or stuck in a loop; if it was a person I cared for, however, their expression was more nuanced. This is how I knew, on the first day of tenth grade, that I was meeting the love of my life.

Her name was Lauren, with auburn locks and gray-green eyes. On that first day, I made sure to sit with a one-person buffer between us, and continued to do so seemingly indefinitely. She was new, and rumors quickly began to circulate. Kids spoke of inordinate wealth, and fame in far-off countries. Some said she had an accent, although none could deduce its origin.

I fell in love with Lauren and eventually married her. Her previous boyfriend, a bullish guy named Petey, strangled me in my car and put some asphyxiation-related porn materials next to me. Lauren and Petey then got back together, which I stuck around to watch because I was so furious. My rage slowly built up watching them together, until I couldn't handle it anymore and broke off from the thread in order to attack Petey. I strangled him, and Lauren got the hint that I was taking vengeance from beyond the grave. I am now stuck wandering the earth forever because I broke off from the thread which should have carried me to heaven.

An abstraction, with very little basis in reality. But the power of its logic is stifling. That it is, how it came to be, that it will persist, are accounted for; the senses agree. Nevertheless, knowledge is lost and confidence aloof. Thereby a haze smothers you, leaving you awash in your own chemistry. Blood rushes to the head. Spores dance, invisible, in the breath.

The past stretches to inconceivable lengths, a road you wander endlessly. You hope that one day it will be conceivable, that you will conceive of it. You are discouraged. You break walnuts against a walnut tree to see how they fall; intuit crawls out of them clumsily. You grab with stubby fingers, but it slips into the woods. No luck. You remain petrified, half asleep.

The critics disagree. One says it doesn't matter; the other says it is all that matters. They wake you periodically to remind you their position, slap you on the back, say goodbye.

The earth is shifting inward, evening out. It makes more sense, you think, as concentric rings form. Your ideas are ground to dust in the quaking. Once, you scribbled them in the earth to be devoured under trampling feet. Now, it seems a pointless burden.

Rarely, every letter is a stone; rarer, it is a feather. To write is to lift it; to be written is to fly. Is the weight wrought of anxiety, or narcissism? Who are you looking to fool?

I've gotten into politics during the pandemic. Ideologically, I am egocentric. I don't consider it selfish; no one knows except you. I've heard it's a growing movement. You might want to look into it. I sometimes wonder how many of us really believe.

This morning I woke up to several missed assignments. Still tired, I made coffee and set up my computer. I must be better, or I won't get a job; if I work hard enough, I might be a stenographer. I'll give you some advice: take an axe to the walnut tree; tear up the old, worn-out road; rake the ringed earth with your clawed hands. It is impractical to wonder.