Decades

My Last Night

  For a moment that seems like an eternity, my breath is taken away at the sight of a mushroom cloud rising in the distance. It’s a warm, March night. It’s the last year of a sad decade. I am standing in the parking lot of the building I live in.

I’m watching the stupendous mushroom cloud on the horizon with my eyes wide open and with my lips slightly apart. At this point, my mind crosses all barriers and I transcend my surroundings and myself. I am dislocated from space and time in an instant. So many perceptions and feelings occur in what is normally just a few regular seconds that usually go by unnoticed and unappreciated. I don’t feel my body because I have become all perception. My awareness is raised to an unprecedented degree. For the first time in my life, I am coming face-to-face with my own mortality.

Death, like war, suddenly becomes very real. I remember being at my grandparents’ funerals, but during the procession I did not think about how one day that could or will be me. It is no longer something that happens to someone else or to someone that is usually old. It can happen to me and it can happen right now if the next bomb falls where I am standing. War is not something that happens somewhere else, somewhere out there beyond the horizon. It is happening right now and it’s right in the middle of where the earth meets the sky. The mushroom cloud seems to be rising out of the ground and reaching for the sky, almost trying to connect the two in a fiery fury, breaking the middle point of the sphere.

It feels unreal because I have seen similar explosion clouds on TV, usually the ones caused by nuclear detonations, specifically the Hiroshima and Nagasaki ones. Both cities were nuked close to my birth date, Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9 in 1945. Nearly forty years later, I took my first breath as the warm wind blew throughout the white city. Less than two decades after that I am motionless and breathless, frozen in time as I look upon the mushroom cloud that is smaller than the ones caused by nuclear bombs but no less menacing. Disoriented, I reach for a remote to change the channel but this is not on History Channel, this is history in the flesh.

The central question that’s staring me down while I’m facing the possibility of a violent death is why me? What did I do to deserve this? I am generally a good person so why is this happening to me. What is the set of circumstances that has lead to this? Was it preventable? The mind, the ego, can’t accept that it’s all random. There has to be a reason, karma has to be real.

            Suddenly, I am outside of myself. I am looking at me, at what I am. I feel a sudden shock and loss of breath as I realize this. I’m panicking as I start to feel the need to go back into myself as soon as possible. I look at this body of mine, this mouldable vehicle. My face, its features are strange to me now.  I feel that what I truly am, my essence, is not adequately represented by this manifestation.  I shouldn’t have these thoughts but I’m starting to feel like I was an alien that navigated a probe vehicle, which was the body. I was an explorer who had lost his way home and had forgotten who to report to or how.

            Why am I thinking like this? What is happening to me? I start to levitate away from the scene and the image of my body standing frozen in the parking lot evaporates. Everything just melts away as I drift away. The mushroom cloud, the parking lot, the cars, the people, the trees, the bombs, the planes that are dropping the bombs, are all mysteriously gone but I’m still here because I just perceived the vanishing of everything. My consciousness is still present. My mind still perceives.

            I feel that I am nowhere and everywhere at same time. I am trying to find myself again as a form in space and time but I am not receiving any outside signals. A voyager left behind to navigate on his own through the mind of the universe. The five senses feel like one sense now. Everything is direct with no filtering. I am feeling everything with my mind or my soul or both. They feel like one. I feel like mind, body, and soul have become one. I have become a ray of awareness, a pure, undiluted consciousness. I start to feel random bits of data and facts rubbing against my awareness.

            I realize that everything always exists somewhere in the eternity of the universe. All those moments of existence are constantly cycling through themselves like old film roles. Moments captured like videos and on continuous replay. Every moment ever, can be accessed in the infinite archives of the space-time continuum. The fabric of the Universe is infused with knowledge and information. Suddenly, my surrounding changes from colorless and shapeless. I am in a gray, foggy tunnel and I notice that my memories are adorning the walls of the tunnel. I feel that I can enter them and live through them again, or I can watch them from the outside like a cinematic experience.  Maybe I can gain a new perspective on my life if I watch it like a movie. It might help me explain why I was about to be killed before being sucked away into this tunnel. How did everything get to this?

            The memories start to roll and shift back and forth until stopping at one of me watching the evening news. The news is showing footage of a mass grave and some people standing around it. I then start to feel that these memories are not all there is but that I can also access information that I didn’t possess at the time of the occurrence of these memories. Anything connected or surrounding the memories can also be accessed and understood but since everything is connected that means I can access everything.

            This realization makes me feel a surge of energy. I feel godlike since I can possess true knowledge of anything I want.  I think that this tunnel is some sort of a secret dimension of the universe where the memories of my and everyone else’s life are kept. It’s like a library of my life but instead of books, there is footage that can be accessed. Any event during my lifetime is accessible to its full objective extent. Anything I think of will then be shown on the walls of this tunnel. I will be able to understand everything.  I just need to ask and I will receive.

            Why are bombs falling out of the sky tonight?