In Addition to Dying

            When we die, our bodies are lowered not into a grave, but into the back seat of a car one of our best friends drives. We are looking down, trying to light a cigarette, but the wind through the windows keeps us from doing so, and so, when we look up finally, after that infinitely long trip through the black, empty streets, we find ourselves in a cushioned position with the parking break on in the parking lot of the hospice our favorite aunt and, in some sense, second mother, died in when we were eighteen.

            We remember copulating with another body we thought we finally loved for the first time the night after our aunt’s soul left her body. We remember thinking we don’t know what we’re doing, “but the sadness will make up for it” while we try to keep quiet because our parents are asleep down the hall. We remember thinking how “all the porn added up to this?” Suddenly, the hospice building shrieks through our sight and conception of the clock and we somehow realize we are moving backwards or forwards through time. It is difficult to determine which, and depends on when we arrive upon this realization.

            Some of us will revert all the way back to the pictures we saw of our first birthdays. Though we don’t honestly remember this moment, we vicariously experience it, giving a strange, inexperienced existence to those memories we don’t recall. Our fathers are somewhat drunk in the corner, wondering how they even got the girl they have convinced themselves they love pregnant in the first place. We are their third living child (fourth, technically) but, by some awkward epiphany, they have only come to think of this now.

            The time in second grade when the girl we thought was cute and convinced ourselves we were in love with finally talked to us passes as well. That elementary school we grew up in is blurred by the movement of this passing we are experiencing, but we can still recognize it as such.

            Because we have become prone to thinking of all our milestones in terms of schooling, we don’t remember any of the times we spent at a friend’s house at the end of the block, hearing stories about the Gila Monster he had, alive and well, living in his camper on the side of his house, or the time he threw rebar like a tomahawk into the flat part of our faces. We don’t remember how our English teacher told us we would never amount to anything, but that passes easily through the sieve of our thoughts because we are no longer the person we were.

            We are now, and will, from here on out, be something we can no longer conceive. We are ideas. We are the thoughts we once had as living beings. All our memories pass through us as though we are smooth rocks lying dormant in the rush of a river we held a girlfriend in once to keep her warm. We are the cooling wind on our own skin we felt in that window of spring, which exists for such a short time in Arizona as the valley lets itself become submissive to the summer. We know we are fleeting but we cannot accept such a fate. We want a god to cradle us and tell us we did well, that we were good and faithful servants, but such an afterlife does not occur. We become a foreign version of nature as our bodies pass into a form of our memories, but we are still unexpectedly happy that such an afterlife exists, no matter how quickly fleeting it is.