A Conversation.

I had just left the bar at closing time, it was cold and the night was threatening rain. A rush of wind caught me off guard and I stumbled as I made my way in the direction of the parking garage a few blocks away. My eyes were cast downward, inebriated and hardly focused. I came to a crosswalk and decided to wait out the signal, my arms were wrapped tightly across my chest to bar the cold. Glancing to my right I saw an old homeless man sitting on the concrete. He was leaning back against the side of a brick building and his bare feet were planted before him, knees elevated and arms resting casually upon them.

He was staring at me, and I felt compelled to join him. So I did.

I walked over and sat next to him, then smiled. He returned my smile but said nothing.

“You hungry? Need money for anything?” I asked.

He gave no reply, with the exception of continuing to gaze at me, that smile on his lined face. It was unnerving. A lack of comprehension was not what silenced him, that I knew on instinct. Strangely, I felt I knew him.

“Your smile is genuine. I mean no disrespect but aren’t you miserable out here in the cold?” I asked him as I felt the chill infesting my own bones.

He again answered me with silence, long enough for me to feel awkward, but eventually he did speak.

“Without darkness, one cannot truly appreciate the light,” he said, “It is the same with life. I appreciate it because I remember death.”

My smile faded as his remained. His stare was lucid, I saw no madness within it. After a moment I nodded and asked, “So you remember death? What was it like?”

His pause was not as long this time, but palpable. “You would not understand,“ he said.

“How long were you dead?” I asked.

“That question makes no sense. Time speeds up when you enjoy yourself, it slows down when you don’t. It’s only relative but had no relevance in that state,” he replied patiently. His words were delivered unhurriedly and as relaxed as his aged frame. But I sensed authority about him.

”What did you see?” I asked.

”You don’t receive any information while you are there. You are just there. Then all of a sudden you begin to feel this tremendous amount of data being shoved within you and you hear screaming. Screaming and screaming and when you realize it’s you screaming you don’t even recognize your own voice.

All you see is energy and the collective consciousness begins to take hold. It tells you that that is a wall, that this person is your mother and that one is your father. And for the briefest of moments you know it’s not true, it’s all just energy but you quickly succumb. And you forget. I, however, remember.”

I felt an ache, a dull throb deep within the pit of my stomach. It felt like the rhythm of doom. Eventually, I was able to speak.

-”Is there no escape?”-

We both said those words at the same time and that ache became an intense stab of agony. My mind flashed to something…. something that I could not understand. Desperately and possessively I clung to reality. I felt my eyes growing moist and my fist were tightly clenched.

His smile turned paternal as he said, “Go back to sleep.”

I said, “But I’m awake.”

”Go back to sleep,” he repeated.

And I did.

I went back to my routine where I feared the future and regretted the past. Where I imagined better things and sometimes I imagined worse things and life flew by as if in a dream until one day I found myself on my death bed and I remembered that conversation.

I remembered them all, thousands and thousands of the same conversation throughout an innumerable past.

I remembered, then I forgot.