A dead man walked into heaven feeling overwhelmed because he no longer knows what he is looking for. He bumps into an angel who is all too willing to help.
“Are you a newcomer?” asks the angel, peering at him curiously.
“Yes, I’ve just arrived,” replies the dead man.
“That explains the stench, we’ll put you straight through the incinerator, you won’t need any of those here,” says the angel waving at the dead man’s rotting limbs, then sets him on fire. “If it ain’t gonna happen to you on Earth, it will happen to you elsewhere,” shrieks the memory of the dead man’s mother’s voice at the dead man.
The dead man sat in the middle of the fire not knowing what to do. He eventually felt uncomfortable, his thoughts questioning whether he was in the fires of Hell or being cleansed for a safe passage into Heaven. “…get rid of his ‘stench’” as the angel put it. The more he tried not to think about Hell, the closer he found himself to the hear of the fire. Up until that moment the fire had appeared as a shelter. The flames appeared to be getting hotter and hotter arousing new and strange anxieties. He felt cornered and tried to run, but his limbs had fallen to ashes. No arms, no legs, no hands, no feet, no eyes, no ears, no smells, no runny nose, no mouth, no tongue, no saliva to swallow. Nothing. No weight, no height, no length, no dimension, no colours. There was nothing. Not even himself. Everything vanished and he became nothing.
Back on Earth, a woman who had never met him organised his files and for a minute stopped to take a look at his photograph. She could smell yesterday’s pub on his breath. His eyes told her stories of his torturous life cycle, of adventures and misadventures. A bit like herself. “He must have died a happy death,” she muttered quietly then closed the folder and flung it into the shredder box. She too was on the exit and soon there would be nothing left for her, but nothing.
Weeks later, all the shredded paper was recycled at a pulp factory that produced wallpaper. The dead man’s folder had been shredded to bits and was thrown into a high temperature basin. His photograph dissolved along with the record of his life history, now the consistency of a thick, jelly soup, sticky goo that didn’t even look like paper. There was nothing left of his folder. It was gone forever. Absent from the files, away from the incinerator.
A dead man is what he is. A man who went from something to nothing. That is the story of life. Strange and overwhelmingly cold to try and put your feet in a dead man’s shoes.Unless you decide to walk away with them of course. The shoes may offer warmth.and helps forget nothing because nothing is not who we, the living are. There is something between us that is full; nothing is empty, but we are not. If you cannot relate to this something then you may be aspiring towards something else. And if you are attached to nothing, you will either turn to nothing or claim your way back to something new. Something is life, not a status, or a rank. Something is you and me.
We all go from something to nothing. Nothing comes from nothing; because there is no relationship in nothing, it is empty, full of solitude, remorse, bleak and obscure. Nothing comes from nothing, but for something to come out of nothing, contact must occur between nothing and something. And when that doesn’t happen, nothing remains the same, and something moves on to better things in life for something is in the living and nothing is in the dead.
