Home
It is… surprising, but nice, that death is apparently familiar, comfortable and… homey. I even have a companion, here, mute and almost unmoving though it is.
But then again, I am too pleased with my current existence – or lack of it – to attempt to do or say or think about anything, myself. The drowsiness that came with the quiet and peace lingers as a cosy haze that thoroughly soaks me, inside and out.
That very drowsiness is also what enables me to be calm, even though I seem to be floating in some kind of liquid, as well as inhaling it as naturally as breathing air. To my sleepy mind, it is novel, amusing, but not at all frightening. Ripples and churns in the liquid are a fun curiosity, and bumping against surfaces – soft but defined surfaces – as I am carried in the current only brings me more joy.
In fact, my first ever action in this curious place and in this curious state is to try to reach out to one of the surfaces, to poke at it, when the liquid stays still for too long.
I end up exploring the surface that I have managed to reach, when I notice that it is more of a… tensile wall, instead of a thing. Slowly but surely, I float along the wall, mapping it out, poking at it every so often.
Curiosity and wonder bubble up in me instead of any shred of claustrophobia or even concern, when I come to the conclusion that I have ended up in a huge, vaguely rounded thing full of liquid. But indeed, I have never come across or known such a room before this, and such a homey place at that!
The same feelings are what propel me, almost literally, to inspect my roommate.
Well, to try to inspect the said roommate, really. I cannot seem to catch it whatever I do and wherever I go! It only comes near when I stop, exhausted – but contentedly so – by the industrious dashes here and there that I have subjected myself to. I cannot act offended – let alone be offended – at it for toying with me, however, for it then bumps against me in a friendly manner. Far gentler but quite similar to what Thor used to do when we were yet little children, which makes me feel unexpectedly homesick.
And, the apparently sensitive thing that it is, the roommate dances about, like it never did, attracting my attention away from time long gone. And then it entices me to move once more, to explore the place in a far more sedate pace.
Strangely enough, it feels like when Thor and I explored the palace in search of hidden treasures, true or not, during that long-ago childhood.
This time, the homesickness does not have any chance to linger, as my roommate insists in its quiet way to keep my attention to the various features of this quiet, peaceful, private, intimate place that I previously found, and some that I did not found before.
Quite unlike Thor, really.
And with that bittersweet acknowledgement in mind, between one inhale and the next, beside one that is Thor and yet not, I fall asleep. There is nothing and nobody that I should guard against, here, after all.
I am home.