Everybody’s Out of Town
Being dead had its advantages. She no longer lay awake at night juggling commitments, bills, and bullshit. That was all she ever seemed to do when she was alive. After she died, a karmic balance was seemingly restored to alleviate a lifelong existential void. While she could no longer contact or be with her former associates, friends and family, or access the consumer gadgetry and other accouterments that constituted the basis of modernity, she was finally free to wander the Earth. An overwhelming desire for solitude was her paramount need in life, finally achieved in death. It was a beautiful accomplishment, though not without a particularly irksome disadvantage.
The living were a bore. Somehow they still crowded the Earth. Thankfully, it appeared she could pass through them at will, and they could not see or speak to her. With infinity for self-reflection, she concluded the afterlife was modeled on one’s expectations. The babblings of priests amounted to so much background noise during her life. Their lack of meaning defined in part her eternity of wandering the Earth. She observed that life simply moved on, but without her.
There was still a relatively defined day and night in terms of light and its absence, but she did not feel the need for sleep. Traffic and pedestrians and machines still lurched on in every direction, street signs and video screens hawked their directives and wares. The transition to the afterlife, she decided, was an opaque experience in its entirety. One day, she arrived at work to discover she was dead. The living did not see or speak to her again. Eventually, she no longer heard their meaningless jabber. The signs and screens that crowded her afterlife likewise became unintelligible, just so many shapes displaying gobbledygook, like old analog TV static. She barely discerned blurs in the distance, once crowded with the living, traffic, machines. She remained hopeful that they would altogether disappear. Without the need for time, however, this was seemingly a random occurrence like the passing of day and night. It remained elusive to establish if the afterlife was a cosmology that ultimately adhered to order. In her indeterminate time being dead, she no longer ascertained any reliable sequence of events. The living spilled out around her at random, went about their meaningless business, disappeared, and reappeared. Static.
There were other dead people. Most of them behaved just like the living, and did not see or speak to her, either. She implicitly understood these individuals were actually the dead based on her observations that the living did not see or speak to them, either. That she was conscious of their state of being led her to conclude that these poor souls resided in another phase, like Purgatory, which she herself may have traversed. When she was no longer conscious of the dead, they had to have succeeded in arriving at the afterlife in totality. Sometimes they blurred out, and she wondered if they had instead rejoined the living. The notion simultaneously filled her with repulsion and reaffirmed a lurking spiritual inertia.
She secretly despaired at the completeness of her own transition. A random dead person would occasionally accost her, their words smearing together into nonsense. The paralyzing horror that consumed her at having her solitude thusly interrupted left her in a crumpled heap for indefinite periods of time. Eventually, the dead would wander away, bored. The living continued on, blissfully unaware of these spectral encounters. She recalled that in her former life, she likewise reacted to encounters with both the living and the dead in increasing frequency before she died. In addition to the thirst for absolute solitude, this phenomenon was the only definable emotional fixture that remained in the afterlife.
The journey to pure solitude was completed quite unexpectedly, wandering the Earth near an intersection in the endless city. A predominantly noiseless blur on the horizon gradually became larger. It appeared to pass through her and she collapsed in reverie, unable to fully comprehend its gift. But there were no longer any doubts. Everything nearby became softened and hazy in the periphery of her fading vision, and she was absorbed in the darkness of true release.
