I can’t remember who I was but I know now I can be anything or anyone I want to be.
I’m stuck here. The Sea of Souls, the home of the dead. Where souls are stripped of everything that makes them what they are. Everything of what you are weighs you down and you start to justify leaving things behind. The bad stuff goes first of course then everything else bit by bit until you’re just a vague wisp of nothing drifting in the mist of potential life. Then there’s the newly deads, the weeping wanderers who lose most of themselves in the panic that follows their arrival in this land of souls stripped bare. Then they cling to all they have and mourn the rest and life itself in fruitless suffering. I was probably among them but I lost all I was and in that moment freed myself from grief. If you don’t know what you had it’s hard to miss it. I became apathetic and gave up reaching for the lights as all others tended to. The infrequent lights that wound penetrate the darkness of the ocean of vague memories and take the captured soul to where? To a new life? Ready to stock up on another lifetimes worth of memories, starting the cycle again. Not me. I thought the memories disappeared when I let go of them, they would vanish so quickly. I could grasp at the memories of others until I wasn’t sure of my own identity. Giving in to apathy I sank away from the pale light of the horde of ghosts and fell into total darkness with some few memories, not my own. Sitting in the garden as a small child eating fruit from the bushes. Walking along the beach of a sea in the world beyond the divide of life. The last of my memories, standing by a mirror dressing as a girl kisses me. The love of my life? Did she mourn me? Maybe, it only happened once. Why obsess?
It feels like sinking forever until there’s no sight of the ghosts and ghouls above and then suddenly you land in the sands of endless memories. This is the library of all human memory. If you sink you can watch the world beyond grow younger. Relive the old stories you never believed. I thought I’d love it at the bottom but beyond a point it’s just too much to take. To comprehend all there is to be learnt when you have all the knowledge of millennia drowning you. Sinking further you realise all of the lies that were told to those who came after. Lies told by the tyrants painted as tortured heroes. You don’t sink, surrounded by these memories you just know that so many must have been thrown away so gladly. The blood that cannot be washed away in life drifts away in death but it is not forgotten. The darkness remembers and in its depths I relive the endless horrors of mankind.
I want to take these terrors to the surface, to swim into the light and hope that it brings me a life to correct the lies that are accepted as fact not even opinion. There are too many grains of injustice to pick from on this bed of broken truths. I could not chose one or even many from the crowd of disbeliefs. As my memories have shown me; the truth will out but lies will rise and one misread speech can spawn a religion. I could not carry the weight of worthy truths in this place where all that we know is given physical mass and the pull of forgetfulness is as strong as gravity. We can fly here without our thoughts to weigh us down, or swim at least. The light headed float above the rest in ignorance ready for the next stage be it the first or last. We cannot know where we are going, few enough remember where they’ve been.
I cannot deal with all the horrors of the past myself, perhaps I should leave them as they are and forget as so many have before. Should I leave them as they lie and rise to join the misty swell above? Will the dark knowledge of so many crimes mark my soul forever, how could I hope to forget what I have seen?
I must, I have no other choice. I must return to life.
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