Cold Stone

[DoS Archive]

From: mickoshan@aol.com (MickOShan)
Date: 03 Mar 1998 17:48:31 EST

I awoke, and immediately the hunger stabbed at my chest and crawled up my throat like some angry crustacean, clawing and stabbing. I ignored it, knowing it was as much an illusion as it was yesterday.

And the day before, and the one before that. Two weeks since my death. A dead man can't really be hungry.

Fractal patterns of sunlight spilled in complex random patterns across the unadorned walls of the unassuming rectory in which I slept, the narrow cot with the moth-holed blankets on which I lay shoved into one corner across from the window. Ironically nostalgic. I had been sleeping on cots like it for the better part of eight years, so that its scant comfort almost seemed home to me now. Minus the bars. Minus the guards.

Death provides few escapes.

Next to the rectory the creaking stone of the cathedral stood piled in layer on indifferent layer, the buttresses and gargoyles in their petrified vigilance a mute testament to man's indecision. My feet had found their way here of their own accord, as I wandered that first night, drawn to these pitiless spires as a moth to a flame or a stray dog to his master's voice. Three times I had braved the steps of the cold gray edifice and three times my
legs had faltered, the cross looming over the entry throwing shadows on my precarious faith, the voices of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit a chorus of mockery.

Desolate I sat on those stone steps and looked up to the stars of Purgatory. Gradually it came to me that the stars had all changed, and that coupled with a heady feeling of displacement, for until that moment I had never thought about whether there would be stars in the divine realms. Or, if I had, whether they would be different from those of the mundane world I had left.

Funny that such thoughts as those rarely touch the mind of those who spend so much effort in contemplation of the infinite. Dante was a misguided poet with no more than a medieval imagination. I did not realize until too late how much the heavenly realms mirror the mundane, and perhaps, how much there was of the divine in the world which I chose to think of as ordinary.

Death, apparently, has a few lessons of its own to teach.

I stayed awake as long as I could that night, knowing that sleep should be denied the dead, denying that I should sleep lest I would not wake and find that this is indeed Hell, nor have I left it. In the stillness I saw a discarded bit of paper blow by my feet, which broke my reverie. No more than ordinary refuse, yet a cathartic moment. I resolved in that moment to refuse all food, and let my second death, from starvation, decide where in God's
universe I stood.

My course defined, I strode boldly through the doors of the cathedral, and no shadows or mocking voices barred my path.