A Religious Journey of Thought Alone

Lightening lashed through the sky, slashing the darkness in half like a whip on a slave’s back.  Stars fighting the torrent, trying to peal through the layers of rain, unsuccessfully they shimmered towards a blind plain.  We stared up, waiting for some sign, serene differences from life, like magic lifting our languidness out of the morgue of our bodies.  We wanted to feel our souls separate, be worth more than flesh and bones.  Death denied us any answers, angling the afterlife like a never-ending torrent, torturing our minds and bodies alike.

            “Is this hell?” I yelled towards others around, all staring up at the crackling sky.  They opened their mouths wide, wet groans and yells, incoherent calls.

            “Maaah eeeeeemmm uuuuuuuuh?” they asked in return, revenging the sounds I’d thrown violently towards them.

            The wind ripped out our ears to hear one another, tearing the air between us.  Lightening blinding our bitter sight into darkness and light alone and alike.  Blood and sweat, rain, all filling our mouths like marinade for some celestial meal.

            And so I ran.  Wind pulling me through and forth, the tide of water pouring over my placid skin, skating across fields, falling.  But no ground to catch my beaten body, just darkness.  Swallowing, the lightening flashing into nothingness, darkness, darker than black.  No more sound, silence screaming behind, in front.  No more blood, sweat, salt, just dry nothingness on my lips, like licking concrete.  My skin numb, not even the noticeable tingle.

            The only feeling, sense, settling on my nerves is that of falling, forever forward, into total darkness. 

            “Death is end,” I thought, spreading my arms like wings, wafting down like a paper bag in the hurricane.

            My eyes opened to sunlight, searing through skin, against sand beneath.  Heat hurriedly crawling over the once unfeeling flesh, fettering away at my feet, toes, fingers.  Eyes weakened, my lashes fluttered away the momentary pain like a Percocet. 

            Around they smiled, tribal men and women, blackened by baking in the sun.  Some a mild tan, maybe the younger, the more adept to shade.  White paint putting them in groups, triangles, squares, and circles. 

            “Hello?” I asked a girl, bald but obviously female by her greatly rounded breasts.

            “Nunk?” she replied, the clanking of my heart to the floor of my chest.

            “Where?” my one word question, quietly echoed around the crowds.  They watched me, the marionette of their musical quality, the mouth piece of their mystery.

            “Where!” they chanted, the circles surrounding me, the squares surrounding them, the triangles taking corners.  I laid down, eyes shut like curtains, pretending the outside was over, the tribes invisible.

            And the sounds stopped as suddenly as they’d started.  My lashes fluttered, the form of a rounded man sitting in front of me, the cosmos crawling behind in celestial motion.  His smile wide, a Cheshire cat of condemnable proportions, his peace pulling me in towards the unseen black hole that was question.  Quarreling seemed silly, my words worthless in his furled lips, lightly turned upward.  The curling of hair so slight, his presence the essence of serenity, but blind to the universe around him, he sat.  And so I stood on the invisible walkway of stars and walked away, towards the blackness of forever.

            Walking for what felt like weeks, I wandered into a light, brighter than any beacon that settled in any lighthouse to save any ship.  Its aura pure radiance of red, orange, indigo, settling across the spectrum, spaces of infinity in each change.  And this light didn’t speak or feel, sound, smell.  It just was.  And for that I felt compassion, but not compulsion to love.  And so I went into the brightest center, surrounding myself with light so bright it became deafening as sound and sight ate away at one another.

            My senses destroyed, ruined for eternity, I found myself in darkness, death, unable to be saved, seen, heard.  There was peace in the emptiness, the wrong, the right, the debatable, the defendable.  But the distance always left echoes, silence in solidified states that travelled through my nerves, up and down my legs.  Like the lightening licking my skin, the free fall forever finishing me, tribes of millions making war over my soul, the round man realizing nothing but himself, and the light leading me further into darkness.  The overindulgence of all that is said to be had led me to nothing at all but a mélange of misconceptions and doubt drowning my senses in susceptibility unable to be overcome.

            I tried to open my eyes, enlighten my mind to the darkening skies, but was devoured by my own blindness and digested by the inconceivability.