After The Flood

After the Flood

After the flood, I died of course. There could be no survivors. Just death glinting from unseeing eyes. I was dead and you were dead and they were dead. The water ravaged our bodies and threw them about like children’s play things, and we watched from afar.

‘I liked that body,’ I said to you, ‘I was so pretty.’
‘Who is pretty now?’ you said with a sneer, nodding towards the angry waves as they tore out another hole in my wonderful cheekbones. I had such good cheekbones, everyone said so. I sighed as the white bone pierced through one of my dark mesmerising eyes.

It was such an unexpected way to die. I had enjoyed life. I didn’t think I would. When they told me that I was sentenced to Earth, I cried and wept and plead. ‘Not that terrible place. Please, anything but there.’ I knew it would be bad, but even the lawyers didn’t think the sentence would be this. But the judge was stern. ‘It is your condemnation,’ he said, ‘it is where all the bad people go, and you are now bad.’
‘That’s such a bold statement,’ I said, ‘what do you mean by bad, by whose terms are you defining me? I would like to appeal.’
But the judge turned aside, ‘No appeal, take her down.’
Hands thrust me into the world and I came out a squalling baby, naked and so vulnerable, into a place where nobody could be safe.

Nobody could be safe. Everybody that goes twisted and wrong gets born into Earth, and with all that badness, there could be no goodness. It is a world of bombs and guns and wars, a world of tears and pain and grief. A world that destroys itself time and time again, only to build and restore with misguided belief that there could be something better. How could there be anything better when the badness is inside?

Yet it's such a complicated hybrid of badness and in amongst it all, there is goodness. I found comfort in coffee and reading and television and the internet, The poetry written by Shakespeare and Edna St Vincent Millay and Sylvia Plath moved me and spoke to me of my own grief. The small black cat that I kept as a pet sidled in and out of my legs and made me smile, and her warmth on my lap at night is the closest to happiness that I think I’ve ever felt. I found love and resilience and humour, and I found you of course. You smiled and I recognised you.

How right it should be that you would torment me here, to remind me of what I had been? These senseless creatures running about like ants on their day to day business, they do not know what they could have been. I was a very special type of bad and I was sentenced to remember on the day that I met you.

‘Hello,’ you said and there was nothing unusual in that. But the word stopped my breath and my insides turned to water and I was lost. In that one word, I knew everything all at once and it nearly destroyed me then, just like the flood has destroyed me now.

Your eyes watched me with a flicker of cruelty. ‘We are bound together now,’ you said, and I cried and cried and used my mesmerising dark eyes to hook you in, but they never worked on you. ‘I shall be here,’ you told me, ‘every day, every waking moment, and every dark night. I will be here, for you shall not, you will not ever spend another day without knowing what you did.’

You were true to your word. Memories crashed in my ears and thundered in my heart everytime you touched me. You made me face it.

‘In our world,’ you told me, ‘in our world, we could have been happy. Look what you did,’ and it filled me, it stilled me and I couldn’t live anymore, but I couldn’t die, and you forced me everyday to look.

When I touched the rainbow in our world, I didn’t know that that the colours would fall out of the sky. I had only wanted to feel the red under my skin and eat the blue, drape myself in yellow as I blush pink and indigo, I wanted to be and feel everything that I could be and feel all at once, all at the same time. I didn’t know that it would cause such sorrow. I had watched as the colours fell and burst into flames, and I was sentenced to Earth for killing the rainbow. In Earth of course, they have a faint imitation, but it’s nothing like the real thing. Nobody would ever see the real thing again, because I had killed it. Killed you. Because you are the reds and yellows and blues that I won’t ever see again, you are all of the colours of all of the worlds and you die inside me everytime you take my hand.

Now we are both dead. The wicked people have ruined themselves again and the world has washed itself clean. It will begin again of course. It always does. Life from death.

‘What happens now?’I ask you, watching the last of my dark hair matted with blood and bone disappear under the raging water.

“Now we begin again,’ you say and pull me down because you will never, not ever, let me go.