For some, the afterlife was a continuation of their days on earth, a series of adventure tales or of cozy family life, a romantic comedy or a bloody crime story. For some, it was dark and gloomy, an existence torn apart, caught up forever in issues unresolved, an eternity of suffering, of darkness or of fear.
But for all, it was something. Joy or torment, longing, loving, pain, contentment, boredom. Night, day, dawn, sunset, twilight.
For him … it was not.
The one thing closest to an emotion the boy felt was confusion. He knew he had been swallowed up by … something. Something big. Maybe a whale. Or maybe a whale was merely the closest annotation he could come up with.
He did not know where he was now, or what it was that he was in. Maybe the whale’s stomach, where he now would be digested into oblivion. Neither could he tell if he was standing or lying, walking or floating. Surrounded by shadows, whispers, the faint memory of feelings and actions, he felt unable to get a hold on anything, to grasp anything, not a thing, not an image. Not a single thing presented itself to support him, be it in body or in mind.
He remembered that this was not right, that there should have been something. He knew there had been once, and there almost was, even now and even here, a memory of it, like the shadow of a thing that had once towered over him, the echo of a child’s laugh and a piano played, the feeling of a glance cast upon him, loving, despising, judgemental, a rose’s smell, the weight of a timber beam on a child’s shoulder, the flicker of light on a uniform once worn.
Oftentimes he believed to see others in the swirling grey shadows dancing around him, those others that were all that mattered. Yet whenever he turned to face them, they were gone, dissipated into wisps of smoke, had been nothing but an illusion, a trick of the eye, a forgotten image left in a broken mirror that would never show one thing: the boy himself.
Even the ground beneath his feet seemed to dissolve into mist.
Through the distant sounds, echoing in from a time shattered to pieces, and the confusing memories of a life filled to the brim, yet still unlived, he just barely could hear words spoken in a bariton voice once unduly praised, a voice that had once belonged to him.
"I should have loved to be a sailor."