ABOVE AND BEYOND

Driving with all the windows down, you feel creation itself run its finger through your long dark hair. Far away from any responsibilities or onlookers, you find it easier to appreciate every small sensation as they arrive. A healing wind, neither hot nor cold, dances playfully around the curves of your skin as you cruise deeper into the night and the mood. With the music cranked loud and the warm wind blowing strongly, any attempt at conversation is impossible. Instead, you simply trade blissful smiles and snippets of songs like rose petal kisses between lovers. The man behind the wheel is the man of your dreams, too young to know better and too old to be anywhere else but here. Your childhood is somewhere behind you, as your future waits with endless patience further down the road. Here, next to him, you feel the loving comfort of home.

Breathing in smoke and spitting out laughter, the blast of painfully white light comes as a total shock. You cover your eyes with your hands, blocking the light as best you can as it attempts to sneak through the cracks in your fingers. Just as quickly as it came, the flashbulb brightness whooshes past with the sound of heavy machinery. Both curled up comfortably into the passenger seat and from above, you watch as you veer off the road and into an undeniably amazing series of flips of turns. Instead of the universe, you can and can't feel safety glass shards washing over you like a sandstorm. You are here, but you are there. You are high above the world, and quickly being reabsorbed into it. Thankfully the more you watch, the less you feel, as something pulls you higher and higher into the air. Beyond yourself, beyond life, you feel no fear.

Except for the headlights, you will see no white light. Your life does not flash before your eyes. Instead, that queer feeling of being and not being slowly gets stronger and stronger. Below, you can see the subtle curve of the earth. The car, once the center of the universe, lies useless next to the road in a heap of twisted metal. A few feet higher, and you're lost in the clouds. In every direction, white marble fog stretches out for infinity. Despite the total lack of landscape, you still feel yourself being pulled towards something. More accurately, towards someone. From within the opaque fog, a landscape slowly reveals itself. Pushing itself together and pulling itself apart, into great green gardens bordered by stoic mountains and deep forests. 

Past the gardens, through the forests and over the mountains, you are granted the chance to experience all of creation free from time and concern. To smell, hear, touch and taste, every possible combination of the same basic elements. As soon as you are fully satisfied with all of the offerings of the earth, you come across a great fence with golden bars. 

As if it's coming from the fence itself, your ears fill with laughter as you draw close enough to see what's  waiting for you on the other side. Behind the safety of the fence, a bright golden light shines beautifully and blindingly. That bright golden light is the love and hope of every good-willed creature who has ever walked or crawled. Every act of kindness, every I LOVE YOU that has ever been uttered, you can feel in its warm glow. When the light dims enough to see through the bars, you watch all of existence blur past in zoetrope flashes. In those flashes, you watch yourself love and be loved for infinity. It feels like infinity anyway, until you faintly hear otherworldly police sirens in the distance. Clumped into knots, you faintly feel small nests of safety glass and clotted gobs of dried blood in your hair. You can't stay here, not yet anyway. But instead of feeling mournful, you feel nothing but grateful. When you leave, you will understand that you have always been here just as you have always been there. The laughter you heard was your own, and all that love will still be here long after you have moved on. The pain is still far away, as you are slowly pushed back into the passenger seat that was. Of your time between time, you will have no memory. All you will remember is feeling glass in your hair and tasting blood in your mouth.

When you wake, your throat will be dry and your head will be pounding. You will ask for a glass of water, and be told to eat only a bit of hospital dinner before you fall back into an uncomfortable sleep. When you wake, you will find the man of your dreams there waiting, with rose-petal kisses and snippets of song. 

Before the end, you will laugh and love enough for 10 lifetimes