The Hymn of Michael

           
   
      Michael stopped breathing.  He was vaguely aware of the fact.  Recognized his body's panic as each internal organ was starved of oxygen.  But it was distant.  Far off.  Like he knew he would soon be.  For he knew what this was, what it meant for him. 
     
    The end.

    The cold, lonely, inevitable end.

    And yet he cared little.  Michael knew his life, the kind that had any sort of purpose, had ended long before this haunting pain spread through his body.  A vicious wild fire that licked each of his nerves, catching then spreading the awesome flames.

    Michael even enjoyed the suffering in some ways.  He wasn't a masochist by any means, but reveled in the hurt all the same.  Because for Michael, this was the first moment in a very, very long time where he truly was experiencing something.   
   
    Lying in a bed for five years straight where the only stimulus was the occasional phantom movement of ghostly blotches changing the needles and feeding tubes of a detached body had left him hungry for a more intense emotion, and by God was he getting just that.

    And then it faded.  Michael both felt and lived the feeling.  Like the pain was a drowning echo that pulled his existence in its disappearing wake. 

    A drumbeat hammered fiercely from somewhere in the darkness falling progressively slower, less meaningful.  Michael could no longer think on this noise.  No longer recall what this sound meant.  That his heart, his defiant heart, had come to surrender, marching slower and slower till it marched no longer.  The drifting conscious that no longer knew it was Michael missed the rhythmic beating.  Missed it very much.  Then vanished.

                                       ***


    For a time greater than eternity yet shorter than an instant all and everything was empty.  A darkness much deeper and more profound than the blackest of black was all that was.  A vacuum that swallowed light.  Swallowed thought.  Swallowed existence.  The ultimate reality, the ultimate simplicity, the truth of all.  The end of all. 

                                       ***

    Then came music.

                                       ***

      It filled the empty.  Doused it in awareness.  This awareness drank of the music.  Sipped and consumed the blessed sounds.  The awareness moved in the melody, rushed in the rapids of its glorious sounds.  Yet it never changed location.  For this movement was the miracle of thought.  The slow whispers of an unearthly orchestra shook the awareness till it became self.  But a self still thirsting for individuality.  It was one, yet no one.  A choir entered the strain.  The self knew with its river of moving thoughts that the voices were here to complete the harmony.  It was the song of his life.  The Hymn of Michael.

    He opened his eyes.

    The choir had told Michael of seeing.  Sang to him in a voice that both soared above and yet lifted him heavenly about the world he once knew and the people he had once shared it with.  Rapids splashed as he thought on what it once was to look and watch.

    He looked again, watched again.  It was not like his memory.

    His vision was clouded with action.  Colors swimming with each other, against each other and, somehow, for each other.  Translucent veils washed in every shade, dyed in every hue, created a collage of wonder for the awakened Michael.  Their numbers were beyond count, beyond comprehension.  An eternity of dancing, swirling, diving shadows of beauty.

    And yet somehow Michael could hear them all.  Not as some mixed confusion of noise, not as a senseless chatter of strings and voices, but as individuals.  Each spoke to him and he heard them all separately.  From within himself he felt his own orchestra call out.  Michael stood still, hypnotized by the numerous presences that filled his being.  Enchanted by his own eagerness to greet the other winding ribbons.  Their melodies brought into him a deep warmth.

    From the many arias one song pulsed importantly.  A persistent breeze of eccentric crescendos pulsing to a cadence that, through some impossible means, was instantly recognizable.  It was his wife.

    Michael reached out longingly in the direction of the crucial music.  He felt himself being propelled forward as though he were the fisherman and the fish, reeling himself in with a frenzied excitement. 

    His wife was here.  Somewhere in this impossible circus of twirling colors, waiting for him.  Five years it had been since the last time he looked upon her face.  Since the last time he could throw his arms around her soft body, nurturing the curves of her spine and shoulders and neck.

    And five years since the accident.

    But none of that mattered now.  Five years, five minutes, five seconds.  Any wait was too long to be in her presence and the wait was finally over.  From a small gap in the parading veils a figure was present.  But it was odd, different somehow; and as Michael thought on this, still flying towards her with an impossible speed, he realized that she, like all the others, was also a swimming scarf.  An impression of her body shimmered through a thick indigo as thought it were a sheet tucked firmly around a body.

    Michael was surprised to see this didn't bother him.  Looking at her as she was now, a wisp of indigo swirling majestically amongst countless other similar bodies, he felt as though he were seeing her for the first time.  Not because of their long separation but because this Ella, stripped of her flesh and bones, appeared as a naked soul, shameless and free and proud.