I sit on the old, crumbly brick wall. It is tan, against my pale flesh.

Yet nothing compares to the eyesore of my stark-white sweater.

I am not sure where else to sit. My grandparents grave is but a plate in the grass,

overgrown and overcome with neighbours they''d never met in this cemetery.

It leaves a bitter taste it my mouth. I wish they had been buried with honour- their own plot with as great a headstone as they were. But I was thirteen and twenty respecticaally when my grandpa and grandma died.

I fall asleep in the little cot of a room in their home I'd never venture into before now, with one of my tired uncles beckoning. He asks if it is okay, as a stop before visiting one of my cousins, hut I haven't been in this home in so long- last I was a preteen. I am an adult now. I shut the door with burgeoning pain, my teeth, uneven, buried into my lip to stop the sobs wanting to wretch from my chest.

I had not been in this home since before they bad both passed. It weighs heavily-

over the fair for a plane, or extra baggage I'm sure to bring back with momentos.

That night, among stale sheets and stiff matress springs, I dream.

I dream of a church, perhaps. It is all bathed in dark blue and black. I traverse it with confidence, ignoring the trepidation in my soul as my father leads me soundlessly throughout the Holy place- his soul bright, yellow and pleasant in such a cold place.

I see something on the balcony above where the precession should be. But I don't say a word, as he easily glides through the halls until we end up in a hall, similar to a grand church, or, as my childish mind supplies. from Harry Potter. I cannot make it out. I jam drawn. I do not have time to waver in this place.

It becomes muddled in the darkness. My father's guiding light lost to the shadows.

Yet I know.

This is where I am meant to be.

I stop, near an entryway to a random, empty room. My grandparents don't register me significantly- maybe they don't know how I have aged. Perhaps they see me as a baby still. Perhaps they are preoccupied. I do not register them other than otherworldly. Significant. No matter, I follow my grandmothers beckoning, which I hadn't last I seen her to a sweater she thought smart, and I loathed with hormones displaced.

She leads me to a wall further down the grand hall. I follow: curious, wondering. She tells me somehow, her baby is stuck. I do not remember if it was in her voice- or her accent. Somewhere in my brain, I remember the baby she had lost in her earlier years. Taken by heartless nurses, and discarded in a mass grave by unkind people.

I do not hesitate. I break through the wall. I use a chair that appears- beckon people I was beforehand unaware of to help.They do not. I battle this brick wall myself in a blue haze of my watchful grandmother, bathing me in surety and confidence. The wall breaks, to reveal an old hospital ward. A wary nurse, maybe, and a child in a cot. The cot beams bright blue. I know to burst forward through the bricks tumbling- do not care for the darkness beyond. I scoop the child up- my uncle, sandwiched between three, one of the eldest should he have survived it- and deliver him to my grandmother.

She holds him- in robes that would be used in a baptism, perhaps, as my grandpa crowds behind her with a soft hand and a soft expression so remittent of. my dad now- elderly and fond.

She thanks me for completing her family. There is so much fondness in her gaze. I do not have an urge to ask anything further. Her grin on her second born son, and my grandpa- so priorly joking and ridiculous, is gently observing. I know they ae complete.

And I awake.

Later in my visit, my family tells me how my grandfather had passed when one of my cousins and aunts had found where my uncle would have been buried in an unmarked grave. How she had been content to know it, before she passed.

I wonder, if I had helped her. My grandmother.

This dream, in truth, outside a story tale, had been many months prior. My family hated to hear it when I told it. But when I visited my grandparents grave, I wondered about th4 great unknown. If even in my own mind, I had given them comfort. I hadn't been upset that night- hadn't beckoned them. But they were there. And this dream shall linger in my bones, so long as their blood runs.

On my death bed I decided that were it possible I would fulfill that most ardent human wish, of finding myself face to face with God.

"Is that your last request?" Archangel Michael said ephemerally. I nodded, as Gabriel put quill to paper and made it celestially binding by spitting one final time into the inkpot and making the sign of Eternity on the folded exterior of the illusion.

Five minutes is what had been allotted to me, apparently on the basis of the limits of my good behavior. Or bad, not sure which carried more clout out here on the peripheries of consciousness...

Having passed the threshold of oblivion, I fought for that fraction of an hour to claim some aspects of self. Molecule by molecule I tried to recollect, keeping the pieces of myself together, always as if having to reach a bit farther as I was, so to speak, losing my marbles.

Soon, a similar presence reflected before me. In pieces.

"Yes?"

I could hardly pause in my work, for lack of diligence would mean complete dissipation. Yet I realized the being was as if mirroring myself, also gathering some semblage of self.

We were pulling against each other, dammit.

"Hey!" I cried out. "That was my eye!"

"Sorry."

"How am I supposed to see God?!" irritated, fighting with the odds.

"Just trying to keep it together, buddy... just keeping it all together," Grabbing my other eye. "You know how it is."

09.21.2024

Boss Battle challenge @AJAY9979

If I had the opportunity to experience such a moment, I would likely choose to meet my Creator — God. In those five minutes, I would ask what inspired Him to create me and what purpose He had in mind for my existence, as well as how I can better serve people and their needs. I would want to understand more deeply the meaning of my mission. In the final moments, I would ask for wisdom on how to continue helping people even after they are gone. It would be a profound and spiritual conversation about purpose and the meaning of existence.