72

 I walked alone on the shore, waves lapping at my ankles, obfuscating my footsteps. As quickly as I made them, they filled in with wet sand. A quarter of a minute later, they were gone entirely. At my back was nothing, just more ocean, more sand. It was likewise ahead of me. An endless beach. The Milky Way blinked at me from above, disinterested, callous, dispassionate, but it watched nonetheless. Some sliver of it watched, nonetheless.

The wind tussled my hair.

Salt settled over my tongue.

Four seconds in. Four seconds hold. Four seconds out. Four seconds hold.

All that I’d seen waited for me in the stars, as infinitesimal as the sand particulate that blew down the beach, curving up into melancholic patterns. Maybe not melancholic. Manic? Sad. Raucous. Enraged. All the big ones, always swirling off into some new shape. 

I wondered when God would greet me.

I wondered when any god would greet me, here in the after. I reasoned out that that must have been where I was. After all, every time I reached for the cigar in my breast pocket, it had miraculously regrown to its full length. If I found I desired something other than tobacco leaf, well… That was taken care of, too.

Maybe it was a dream. That made about as much sense. But then, I doubted that. Something about the tremor I’d felt that morning had resembled the last page of a long novel. 

Seventy-two. I’d managed seventy-two cycles around Sol.

When I was young, I’d envisioned the afterlife as a theater. One would sit in the back row and watch life play out again on the silver screen; those that you’d enjoyed most in life would join you there. You would take turns, walking from theater to theater, watching each other’s lives, sampling different snacks.

I hadn’t pictured a beach.

It was fitting, though. What else was life but sand slipping through one’s fists? Build up your castles, dig your moats, paint the Mona Lisa; it was all reduced back to particulate in the end. 

In the novel Fight Club, Chuck Palanhiuk wrote a scene in which Tyler Durden spent a day… Ah, I’m losing it. Here’s how I remember it, anyway. Tyler Durden constructed a sculpture of a human hand; maybe he used driftwood. I can’t remember, and trying will only chase the image away. At precisely noon—or perhaps 3:35pm pacific time, the details are lost on me—the sun struck the sculpture just-so; its shadow settled into place so that Tyler sat squarely in the center of the palm. He went on to drop a line about how perfection lasts only for a moment.

I don’t believe in perfection. I think it’s a reasonable enough pursuit, but I don’t believe in it. I never have. Perfection, if left unchecked, is an idea that prevents all things from coming to fruition. Perfection is a roadblock. It is a cancerous cell, prepared to duplicate until all is laid to waste.

But Perfection is a form one ought to approach, with the knowledge they will never reach it. It is an ever-moving goalpost. In this way, one’s aspirations can be boundless. Know that this, too, is a trap.

I squelched my cigar and felt it reappear in my breast pocket.

“Anyone?” I called.

My voice drifted off on the wind.

I found a pretty shell in the sand and pocketed it.

“Could use a break,” I muttered, and discovered an armchair sat next to a glass table topped by a bucket of ice filled brim with Diet Coke not a minute later. I sat, drank, and watched the galaxy. I could have sat there for a lifetime. Maybe I did.

At some point, I got up and started walking again.

I’d grown a yearning for some of those faces I’d seen during my seventy-two. With no where to go, I carried on walking. I thought maybe they would appear, or maybe I’d find the place they’d all gone.

In life, it had all been sand.