Another Lifetime

He had known her since they were 5 and during summer they would make sand bridges in the Swing Garden under the eternal mango tree. But 21 years later when she saw him, she couldn’t confirm her certainty that he was her long lost friend and she attended him with a stiff formality, making vague attempts to recollect the summer days of another lifetime. But he was aware of her falseness, because he found himself forgotten not with the forgetfulness of heart or time, but with the forgetfulness of death.

“It is you!” she finally cried when light returned to her memory. “I heard you had died in the ‘99 war.”

Reality was he had died, only to return because he could no longer bear the solitude. It was a lie with which he convinced his new mates in the clandestine world of the dead; a place where peace was possible and happiness could prevail, and where no soldier on any side of the border would have to submit to marching orders for the sins of politics. It was a truly happy world where all were dead yet so much alive.

So when he expressed his mortal desire to return, the dead were aware of his falseness. But they let him go.

They knew he wanted to return to living not because of the solitude of death but because the sand bridges of another lifetime had never given him a moment’s rest, dead or alive, and in war or peace.