literature

The first part of something I might be writing

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Literature Text

1.
It is possible to fall out of heaven.
It doesn’t happen often; in fact I have never known or heard of anyone falling back to earth in the time I have been here. That being said, I haven’t been here that long. There isn’t really much in the way of a concept of time. I can only pin point a date to each day if I catch a glimpse of a calendar somewhere on earth. Life on earth can be stolen in little, blissful moments. A reflection in a window, a change in the wind; a precious capsule of time when the film of life pierces through the shields of heaven.
There is no definitive god here, but maybe that is because when I was alive I never really thought there would be. There is however a ‘boss’ – a man in a black suit, with a wooden desk and towers of paper work. I soon realised he only looked so stereotypical because of my interpretation of a man in charge, hence the suit, and whoever may be waiting for me when I die, someone at a desk with a tonne of paperwork. The files of the dead. This was the first person I met after I died. He isn’t a spirit of a human though -  he never lived. He’s just an entity. Not the friendliest guy, but that’s down to my own imagination. I say he was the first person I met, but I was soon informed that my spirit guide was with me the moment my soul left my body on earth, and they guided me to the afterlife. I didn’t know they were there until I was told so, and I have yet to meet them in heaven yet. I imagine they still have people to look after on earth. I always wanted to have the ability to meet my spirit guide when I was alive, but they never revealed themselves to me.
I also keep referring to this place as ‘heaven’, but that is simply due to lack of a better word. It is quite the opposite of what I always pictured the afterlife would be; a lonely, bare place where I endlessly wander as the dimensions occasionally shift around me. The place I find myself stuck in the most is a completely white space, with buildings from busy city streets. No cars or roads or people or noise; just buildings. I’ve yet to explore any because they all look empty. When I wasn’t to see the Boss I just have to imagine myself in his space, and I get there. I have so many questions to ask, but every time I go to him he tells me to keep them for my spirit guide, who will come to greet me when the time is right.
I have met one person in my ‘city’ area, but everyone else I have met I have found when I stumble into different spaces of heaven. Meeting other spirits isn’t like you might think; there is no relief of the fact that we’re not alone, no sympathy in shared conversations of how we got here. Just one mutual factor: we are all dead. It’s almost like bumping into a stranger and sparking a one minute conversation, before moving on alone. Only a few people have I met on several occasions. They are my source of information about where we are, but everyone’s heaven space is different, so there are no definitive answers about mine. There is one thing that no one at all here knows the answer to – is there a hell? I did meet one older lady who told me about how she had spent more time than she had alive creating her Nirvana, and never once had she seen her husband. She was however thankful; he had murdered her. This led me to fabricating the thought that she either never saw him because she had created a place so impenetrable to anything negative, or that there is a place where all the evil goes.
My afterlife is so far a very lonely existence, so I take comfort in the blurry moments when I see a moment on earth unfold. Most of the time I observe a minute of a complete stranger, but I have been getting better at choosing who I can watch. My favourite person to see is my cousin Cole. Although we’re not real cousins, in my whole sixteen years on earth, he was the person I felt I connected with the most. In the months before my death, I had been staying at his dad’s house – my mother’s unofficially adopted brother, who has some super important career, meaning he spends almost zero time at home. This is why when I was little I referred to Cole as my cousin, because for a long time my mother really thought of his father Felix as her brother.
Cole turned 21 about a week after my death, which would have also been my seventeenth birthday. Although he is four years older than me, we would always share our birthday celebrations in the happy company of each other, along with a few members of his family. Since as long as I can remember, my mother, Felix, and I would travel to America every year for summer, where Cole and his mother lived. I remember Cole always telling me in confidence how he secretly disliked his father a lot, for an unknown but ever present reason. Although I only saw my cousin for two months out of every year, he soon became my best friend. Every day I spent in England I would get through it by thinking of the time spent in North America, and reminding myself that I had more time to spend there in the always approaching future. Until one year, when I was about thirteen, we stopped going.
I couldn’t look at Cole from heaven for a long time because it crushed me to see him so distraught. Although we hadn’t seen each other for almost four years, the news of my death was just as hard hitting for him as if he saw me every day, as oppose to the two months each year we spent together. Neither of us knew why our summers together suddenly stopped, and in protest we phoned each other multiple times a week which incidentally cost both our mothers a storm in phone bills. My mother didn’t see why we insisted on spending hours on the phone every day after we stopped visiting when before we would spend ten months apart with only the occasional phone call. I don’t think Cole or I knew either, but looking back I expect it was the desperation to not lose our friendship. By force of our parents our phone calls became limited to once a week, then once every other week, and then over the course of a few messy years neither of us picked up the phone to make the call anymore. Although I hated accidentally catching moments with Cole from heaven in the first weeks after my death, seeing the impact my absence on earth had on him made me feel comfort in the fact that my years of absent worrying that my lifelong best friend had become a stranger, were a waste of thought. Only in the afterlife has it come to light that our connection was never lost. Although we didn’t speak anymore, we remained in each other’s memory. Haunting but comforting memories.
The word haunt seems almost appropriate. Not because I lurk in the shadows of Cole’s house and go bump in the night to scare him, but because he knows I’m with him. It is a mutual feeling of warmth and peace that we share when my presence becomes apparent to him. Although I know I’m not physically standing next to him as he imagines, we both experience this comforting feeling when I’m watching him from heaven. Sometimes he talks to me, when he’s out of ear shot of his goofy roommate, and I can’t help but smile. The more time I spent looking at him live from my lonely spaces in heaven, the more we both knew I was becoming his guardian angel. This however, just as my time on earth, was cut brutally short.
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