Short Story Social – The dead
Image© Anand Vishnu Prakash, YourStoryClub.com
I’ll never get closure on death. I’ll never know what may happen if I ever die. The only time when I’ll get a clue about what death is or what will happen thereafter is after I die. And I don’t want to rush into the unknown. Having had interviewed a lot of people what will or what may happen, I came to learn that no man really knows. It’s all guess work and that gives me sleepless nights.
That’s why seven years back when I wasn’t working, was easy for me to act like I was seeing and speaking to my dead grandmother. How I intimately acted out talking to a young woman I know and have feelings for, a woman who knows how I do but, barely raises her hand in the streets and greet back.
I was in a bad space because I realised that the only time when I got to get people’s attention was when I acted my feelings out in the open. Some had to be weird because though I see and hear people telling me how much they loved me, they never came back to me live after they had passed on and say the very things they said while alive and walking up and down the streets and valleys of this earth.
Since I was born, I never got introduced to some way of preaching or praising. I just followed my heart and believed in whatever I thought was the right way. I’d like to believe that there’s a god, I’d like to believe that there’s a supernatural afterlife whereby people live on forever and ever ‘til I got to say amen but, I live and believe doubtfully so because no man before me has ever died and came back alive—his spirits high and advise us how it would be like to die and get up a couple of days later.
The Christians says Jesus died for all of mankind’s sins and through His death we’ve all been forgiven from all of our sins. That we’ve been cleansed from any grime which may or leads any man to eternal damnation. And again I don’t believe any of it because a Muslim told me that he believes in re-incarnation and that his spirit is that of his forebearers, that the same merciful God is the same Deity who carries mercy on His right hand and destruction on His left.
Again, I’d like to listen to the Muslim but he sounds more like a radical than a believer to me because in all fairness; if a man isn’t sure where he’ll go after he dies, why is he so sure that God’s is willing to punish man at a slightest of any man’s wrongdoing? I ask myself questions and mind you, I’m not asking God to show me the way but use my own thinking and the BIBLE I read condemns me for it.
And when I asked an old lady; ‘who wrote the BIBLE?’ The only answer she could come up with was; ‘ Come to my Church and all things will be revealed to you.”
Again, my mind failed me and couldn’t believe any word she said. And constantly listening to men harp on about how wrongdoers are going to feel God’s wrath and how they’re going to be licked by hell-fires for all eternity, how Lot’s wife got turned by a loving God into a pillar of salt, makes me more wary about finding going to Church and about finding out about what’s it He’s expecting from us men than to get down our weak knees and worship Him.
All I would like to know right now is; do I really have dead people in my life, do the dead really love me like God does, would a time really come when I’d die and face His wrath? What’s it which He’s preparing for His loved one’s in heaven, will this earth cease to exist one day and if the answer is yes, what will happen to us men who would like to not see Him but believe in His power as well? Is there angels somewhere where my eyes could never reach sight-wise, do the angels care about what the hell the devil puts me through every day of my life, are my tests part of initiation into holiness like the holy books before a woman I’ve spoken too while I was on leave from work true and if yes, I’m I supposed to trust and believe in them?
I ask myself questions because though I know when I call God’s name He replies and though, I don’t get to experience burning smoke and fire licking a bush tree like it did before Moses, I always feel his presence. It’s shocking me that I spent thirteen years accusing some woman for having taken my grandmother away in her sleep but still want to consider myself a child of God.
And it shocks me too that when I was busy accusing her of all of that, she was laughing at me and telling me how blind I was. I thought that mine was a way of life, a right way that leads to a life after death but, I couldn’t realise how my own ways could lead me to eternal damnation. I don’t know where I I’m as far as my faith stands. I wonder why I keep longing for the dead long after they’re gone.
Even when the priests assure me that the dead are buried and gone I keep looking for answers but the strangest thing of them all is that; I tremble whenever I see a dead body in a coffin. The memory of it on there lingers on for a very long time to such an extent that I end up wanting to get a chance to speak to them. Seeing that I’m afraid of both the dead and the cemetery, I’d rather stick with Almighty God forever.
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