In Between Lives
Heaven is the basement of a friend’s house down the street and everybody is their invincible and arguably most attractive early-20’s self, and there are vaguely exotic-looking tapestries on the walls with flower and water patterns you just stand and look at in between conversations. You are in the strangest kind of family-reunion-meets-bookish-college-student-gathering, where people are actually talking at regular volume in groups of 2 or 3 and no one is fucked up, just buzzed enough to forgo any conversational formalities with their past reincarnations and greet their kin with giddy, open faces. A 17th century European doctor asks you kindly about your hypochondria. You listen to a Native American man with lines already indented across his forehead talk about his broken, scattered family, and instinctively tighten your crossed arms around yourself. You speak for a while with a skeletal Burmese woman, and you watch understanding deepen in her tired eyes as you describe the way you fought your way to the top of the business, determined to get what was yours. When she walks away, you let your gaze play over the snake on the wall, a perfect circle, the end of its tail obscured entering its open mouth. How horrible, you think, but you cannot look away from the snake’s expression, neither savage nor happy, but simply a weary determination, at peace with un-peace, resigned to eternity.