Postcard From Heaven

A post card.... A window into the illusory afterlife that was designed by man to appeal to his delectations: women and an endless supply of wine. The tempting routes and inviting door bells. The winding alleyways, threading ancient buildings, descending ever so slightly unto a sea of deep azure in the far distance. The olive trees and the easy chairs by side walk cafés. Where did I see this before? I look for telltales of location, for a piece of solid memory. Here is serenity that could only mean a long history of agitation. Here is a calm that reflects a heritage of injustice and pain. Here lies the beauty of the goddess with the raised elbows, porcelain hands keeping hair in place. Like a migratory bird in transcontinental flight, wings spread against the winds, crossing thousands of miles in a posture of calm and indifference.

Behold the scenery as it unfolds, my friend. Here’s a peek of the brown eyes that snubbed snobbery and socialized with god’s apostles. Here’s the familiar look of promise that dragged your soul through the mud of time and the sludge of heartbreak. Here are the old scabs, blossoming anew. And your recidivism at the matters of the heart. “You are the repeater“, these two glimmers of brown gloss are telling you, “You are a repeater, you just never learn”. Here’s the barb wires and partition lines. Here’s the search for a homeland you found in the droopy eyes of a refugee. Here’s your hometown, with no respite for the weary, no break from the searing pain. The leftover of joy you were never able to collect, the hairpins discarded on a dance floor. And the volcanic ash that settled over the rich terrain and smudged your judgment and blurred the postmortem. Here is uncertainty and its derivatives. Here, my friend, is a land where the only thing you dread more than loneliness is companionship.

Those who paid no attention to Noah’s arc, those who hadn’t heeded his warnings, are no longer with us. The rising waters and its challenge held more promise for them than the safety of the ship. Those who couldn’t read the signs, or distinguish the shifting colors of the macadam on the way to wasteland, they are no longer with us. But we envy them nonetheless. They just shuffled along happily. Those who couldn’t read the writing on the wall, couldn’t decipher the text nor interpret the murals, are probably the happier for it.

For now, you continue to indulge in your selfish dance of catharsis. You try to emulate the arrogance of those who pick wild flowers for the sole purpose of depriving the sun of their beauty. You wish you could own the gloss of that postcard, morph it into an energy of your liking and convenience. But alas, unlike your fantasies, those colors are real, and they shall remain beyond your grasp for as long as you dared them to come close.