We spend our entire lives running from death. We train our minds to give purpose and meaning to our pathetic existence as we gorge ourselves upon waste, trying to trick the fates as if purity would repel decay. But in the end, all attempts prove futile. You cannot run from death, he is always there, just around the corner, waiting to carry you away. In the end we are all the same; bodies left to rot, to sleep for an eternity undisturbed. The priest sleeps only feet away from the killer, their fate the same. All that waits is a silk rimmed box.
Death is the ultimate fate, silently crouching at the end of our ropes to rock us to sleep and whisper muted lullabies. He lays us down in our eternal bed and shuts our vacant eyes waiting for all to be silent, for the last tear from the funeral march to dry, for the process to begin. He grabs hold of our bodies, making them betray us as they consume us from the inside out. Our bodies swell in the absence of life, destroying our living form. Grave wax takes hold of our faces as our flesh collapses leaving the stains of death upon the finest white silk. We waste away to limp folds of skin sprouting flaxen hairs supported by hollowing bones. Decades pass and we return to the dust of which we are comprised, we dwindle down to our tainted bones clothed in the finest of linens and become no more to the world than a name on a slab of marble.
To those above we are a name, a fading face in the back of their minds. We are the ghosts that hide in their subconscious, furtively dragging them down to rest alongside us. As time passes our grave becomes no more than a strange combination of consonants and vowels, our life is forgotten, and the land that we lie in follows time and what once were flowers become weeds. The living march along in colonies like insignificant little ants caught up in the delusion of life, busying themselves with passing luxuries. The lives of those centuries dead don’t even pass their mind as they tear apart our sacred land, disturbing our sleep for a strip mall to go bankrupt in five years. And so we lie in our silk rimmed box; trapped in a perpetual nightmare unable to move, to speak, to cry. In death only does the holy man become one with the convict.
This is the world beyond life. This is where love cannot grow, where hates withers, where fear resigns. This is where the mind cannot venture, where the body is all. This is where all illusions stop, where truth reigns. This is where nature reclaims what is rightfully hers, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This is the end, the inevitable conclusion to all our petty sufferings and attempts defy the fates. In the end we are all the same.
Copyright Shannon Ulmer 2010