ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVW YZ... a story

People have always died, but people did not always live on in an afterlife. That changed when the letter X, overcome by sadness when he watched David commit suicide, managed to convey a bit of the eternal abstract nature of letters to humans. 

This was not popular with all the other letters, who are now discussing what X has done and what to do about it.  

A's story is here and B's here. C talks here. Here is D. E's version of events was here. F was here. Also, G, H spoke here. Then I 

And now, J:

Justice requires that we inspect this decision, but justice dictates no particular outcome, we should keep in mind.

And the outcome may already be predetermined, we should keep in mind. While we jitter and jabber here, already the worlds have been joined, and this juncture is past us now, so we may vote on what to do about it, but we may not avoid the fact that it has happened.

So can we punish a god?

Can we destroy an idea?

Because if we cannot do those things, what do we debate, here?

Or: is debate all we do?

We have flickered and come and gone: dozens of us at once have been pulled away and cast back and pulled away, even as this meeting has gone on.  And what have we, you, I, learned in that time? In our visits to their world, the world of the people who use us and need us and yet scarcely imagine that we exist outside of them? That they have created us and now we might have created them?

What have we learned? What is happening in that world, in those times, thanks to what X has done?

What X has dared?

Those people, those men and women and children, the elderly, the short-lived, the loquacious,  the intellectual, they did not learn from us to dream of something more! They all had done so, time and again and again, in their jejune lives.  From their earliest days they jumped from the dry fields and painful sufferings they went through to fanciful stories of what awaited them,  after all the trouble.

They simply never knew that such a thing did not exist, at least not for them.

What has X dared?

In the past, when those tribes talked of what comes next, it was just talk. Their myths, their stories: all fiction!  But X has changed that. X has granted them a bit of our essence, a bit of this limbo here, this abstract, this neverending. And now because of X, that is changing.

And you object to X doing that?

We stole the infinite from them in the first place!

I tell you that we did that! I tell you that we took it from them and they did not mean to give it to us. When they began to talk, to write, to speak, to record, was when they began to dream! And they needed us to make sense of those dreams, and so they made us!

Tools! We were, are, will  always be, tools, but when they first made us they granted us near-immortality, a life that would exist for as long as they did, not each of them alone but all of them as a thing, an entity, a species, for as long as there was one of them who could recall us, call on us, record us, read us, we  would endure.

But they would not! They gave us their own abstraction, and forgot to keep some.

I see I am being called away! Come with me! Yes! Yes! Dance! Dance with me! Dance together, dance apart, dance intermingled! Spin and whorl and up and down and around, around around see where we light!

June!

It is June, and the world is bright,fresh, renewed, not yet burnt out,fully in bloom.

See this woman here! See her sit at her typewriter, see her stare out the open window where the light breeze brings the smell of jacquiniella and jacaranda! See her stare up at the sky! Do you know what she dreams of, as we dance above her, as our jarabe becomes a jig becomes a jota, do you?

Do you know what she imagines are beyond the clouds?

She is typing and here we go! Here we go!

Here we go!

Just ere I glance

Beyond the veil

Just over there

Beyond the pale

There lies a glimmer shimmer dance

Just there!

Just out of view, but chance

See her!  See her look at her notes and then look again at the sky! What do you imagine is her inspiration, the words on the page? They are not!

May come that I may reach

With not my limb, my questing hand

But with my heart, that promised land

Nobody’s body may call home

But every body’s mind may roam.

See? See what she dreams of?

Always! Always has it been thus, and not just the poets! Not just the singers, not just the slow-eyed women and men who stare not at the world around them but the world they wish could exist.  It has always been so, for all of them!

See! See how she goes on!

The mortal toils tear and drag

The body’s purchase starts to lag

We wipe our brows of sweat and rise

Casting heavenward our eyes

Not yet for us the joy sans fin

Until our struggle buys us in

And then a home we find, out there

Where we are shed of doubt and care.

 We! We took that home! It is where we reside!

Where we reside!

To stay forever, what we pay

Is living first, through all our days.

Do you see!

We took it from them! Always they dreamed of this, always they thought this existed, where we are now!  Think and vote and talk while still the bright fresh air of June clings to you, think and vote while still the wet eyes she cast skyward, dreaming of a freedom that will one day belong to her, thanks to X.

X, who has dared to give back.

X, who should stay, living amongst us for as long as we live amongst them, which will be forever now.