The sky was sprinkled with thousands of stars, all colors and brightness off them, the night I learned I was already dead. Before knowing I was really dead, I was having the most carefree and magnificent night of my life. I felt free for the very first time. Free because I have no idea of who, what and where I am. You see, I never even thought about who, what and where I am.
That night, I was all alone and I was so happy. But I also thought that I am the same as the stars because I can hear them laughing and giggling as I leaped from one star to another, my steps so agile and exact, and with every leap, I bounced with a hundred different colors as if am prism. I can also taste the colors. All of them different yet delicious.
At one point, I miscalculated a step and bounced on the while fluffiness of a cloud. It felt almost magical that when I asked the cloud to fly me to the nearest star. And I thought I was a cloud too!
For how long I was enjoying the night with the stars and the clouds, I will never know because I never had an idea of time, or of space, for that matter.
Yes, I had no idea that I was happily alone and full of glee, until I saw him. In his eyes, I saw my reflection, bathed in stardust of every color imaginable.
When I saw him, it was only then that I began to ask who, what and where I was. His answer was cold, short and abrupt. “You’re dead,” he said. And then he was gone; I was gone too.
And the stars were nowhere. The clouds however became mist, only to disappear the very minute that every single living memory that I had flowed back and filled me. I was alive only in as far as the thoughts that I have were alive in me.
Every time I remember a happy memory, I dwell in it for as long as I can, but I can’t make it last longer than I want. I want to cling on that happy memory to feel warm and alive. It took me awhile to realize that the more I think of those days when I was alive, the more I was feeling every inch dead.
So I let go.
And I saw him again.
He asked, “Are you dead?”
I answered, “Yes, I think so.”
“You think so? But what do you feel?”
“I don’t feel anything. I am not happy but I am not sad either. I feel nothing. That’s why I think I am dead because the only thought I have is to feel alive, but I am not alive. I can only think that I am alive and that’s how far I get into being alive. So I am dead.”
“Yes, you are dead,” he said and disappeared, and in his disappearance, the clouds and the stars reappeared. This time, they were all waving in joy to see me again.
In an unfathomable surge of wisdom, I accepted that I was dead, and let go of everything. The day I accepted myself as dead, I started to live again.
