At some point in the last couple of months, the often tangled clouds of dream and fantasy – the things that go on in the back of my mind, when I'm washing the dishes or walking to the bus, or... – those clouds have moved into something unexpected...
If, when we die, there is some place to go, where others are who have died already... (what was that film from last year, The Tree of Life? Like the ending of that, then); what will we say to each other? How will we look, do we hug in the same ways, or want to?
People who died at very different ages, in different times....
Somehow I can see some of the lovers and friends who died of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. For one thing, they are of course younger, fresher: naturally they would encounter me and be, well, a bit shocked, perhaps repulsed. Rather uncomfortable: they wouldn't quite know what to say, would want to exchange a few conversational fragments, then get away to be back with... people their own age.
Or is there some kind of ecstatic reunion, followed by confusion: the world changed, after I died? Well, how, what do you mean? And why are you different now – did you change, too?...
And yes, of course: those other fantasies, familiar from many imagined and implied afterlives, where we are all at some central point in our lives: where we are reestablished as beings who have an ideal state, who don't live in time. I can imagine that, too: but perhaps I don't think of myself that way enough these days – my analyst, my medical doctor and my acupuncturist, all of whom point slightly testily at my collapse into a weaker and older image of myself than actually exists, would probably be in agreement about me here.
A somewhat muddled afterlife, then: where there are young people and old people, who remember caring about each other more than anything, ever.
But who don't quite know what to say to each other any more, or whether there is anything they can do together that would make sense... And then the clash between increasingly fantasized, love-imbued images of people, and their complex realities. It's true that the reality is (almost always) better; but you also discover that you don't quite know how to connect with that reality...
As though we no longer know our lines. Or, more acccurately, as though, even among the people who matter the most in the universe, we don't quite have... a place.
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