Nuchida Takara

Limbo

The inevitability of life generates on the pulsing mystery in which it is shrouded. I could elaborate on this issue. Tell you there is no God. No salvation. But then what is the point of that? Existence is a grain of sand churning in the belly of an oyster. And, like humans, it demands to be recognized as more than merely a grain of sand. We all view ourselves as pearls in the making.

Only sometimes, life intervenes with our plans. We are pried open and sucked into the sagging jowls of death, only to be spat out as nothing more than a slightly larger, and somewhat misshaped, grain of sand. And there we rest at the foot of the endless sea of death, nothing more than a spec of sand among infinite others. We glide this way and that in sync to the rhythmic ebb and flow of life continuing without us.

There is no remorse, though I’m not sure if there would be had I been able to hold on to lifely matters like emotion. Unfortunately, it drained out with every other conceivable liquid from the crevices of my body when I died. Perhaps Death itself soaked it up with bread and savored its volatile relish. I wouldn’t put it past the beast. It’s been known to do much worse, or so I’ve heard.

It’s interesting the things you hear when you die. I don’t know whether it was my body going into shock or massive loss of blood; but I heard many things. The secrets of life whispered to friends, priests, the night, were screaming into my ears. It was like the sudden gales of of a hurricane whipping through the canyons of my ear canal. A most horrible sound, it was nothing more than the pains of life in its unspoken purity.

The shrieks scratched at my eardrums until I’m pretty sure they burst. I lost all sense of equilibrium and fell into a vortex of voices. They spoke of the beast in many tones. Its fur matted with the sticky sweat beading on the brows the nearly still-living. A belly so swollen that not even the sun rises above its horizon. It walks in a permanent shadow bleeding from its heels.

Though it is most vicious, always victorious, Death should not be feared. It creeps slowly, silently, and it has no face. It’s the chilling darkness that curls around you tight, tight, tighter until you are helplessly paralyzed. It swallows you whole, wrapping its thick lips around you and devouring you sometimes more slowly than others.

Here is my limbo, my fear. I wait attoseconds, eons, in the vacuum of emptiness for my fate to unravel itself. Death could care less if you are Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Atheist. Not time, not gravity, not pi, and certainly not faith can survive Death. There is only myself and what I discern to be the heavy breathing of the beast now digesting what’s left of me.

I fade in and out of what I can only perceive to be reality.

A stray cat shrieking in the night, a coastline devoured by the persistence of the tide, the sands of time fed by our own rotting corpses as we are each claimed by the insatiate appetite of decay.

For reasons such as these, there rests Aguni Jima. Perched on the edge of the Pacific, the sprouting land bears the scars of its time. Neither the savagery of the sea nor the gnawing jaws of death of conquered the crags cutting defiantly into the winds above.

They whip sharply in and out of the rugged coastline, screaming tales of those who refuse to be forgotten. They are plagued with the knowledge of things unspoken--the secrets whispered by the reeds, sung by the crickets, and seen in the eyes of the beast called death. They sleep in warm blood, prisoners to the hearts of the living, until that singularly final croaking breath taken in vain hopes to seal one’s fate.

These secrets are the very fibers of the first apple eaten upon birth. They are parasites meant to carve holes into our hearts, and they plunge from our throats and eyes as they burst open in horrific recognition the moment we die--the moment when time stands still and we can no longer deny our destiny, sealed in eternity before our failing vision. It is then we stare into the face of the demons who haunted our dreams.

Its eyes watch us, bemused; its nostrils curled as it hungrily awaits our souls. Drool bleeds from its oozing mouth, baptizing us into our damnation.

We are, at this point, helpless. We watch with inanimate eyes as our yellowed limbs are engulfed into flames. Those we once loved before emotion drained away with every other fluid from the crevices of our bodies wail in despair of our passed lives, in knowledge of what was to come. The last beams of light we’d every feast upon fingered their way through the smoke of incense and the dust of bones we lie in, crippled.

Here, then, in these last fleeting moments of solitude, the hunger sets in.