Collections - 23. Chapter 23 - Let's Pretend

Let’s pretend about death. Let’s pretend that when you die all you’re left with is what’s in your memory. All your memories, the good and the bad. It’s all dark and warm, like you’re lying in a comfortable bed on a good night with your eyes closed.

Memories come and go, even things you thought you forgot. You’ve got eternity to remember. You can hold a memory for as long as you want. You can explore it. You can see, hear, touch, taste, smell it again. You can live in it.

You can also imagine. Imagination goes with you like Good Deeds. Though if you had a weak imagination, it will be hard to develop a stronger one. Your limits go with you, too.

If you died young, you won’t have much to remember, and that will be hard to expand. If you died before you were born, you’ll float almost thoughtlessly. But if you died old, you’ll have your entire life to revisit, as you wish.

You can spend eternity in the good parts, if there were good parts. You can spend eternity in the bad parts, if that’s all you knew. You can spend eternity trying to imagine there was anything better than the little you’d learned, no matter how hard you tried.

And you can spend eternity in your favorite parts. You can stretch them. That girl, boy, man, woman you wanted to know – you can imagine what might have happened. You can spin endless variations, under your control.

And you can’t be blamed. You never need to be excused. Your can sleep with your most intimate relatives and not have to tear out your eyes. Or you

can tear them out if you’d like, just to see how it feels. Then you can pop them back in or eat them or feed them to mice, and you can see anyway, in the next instant or next eternity.

And you don’t have to worry about how you look. You never have to shave or diet. Of course, you can’t really eat. Death is insubstantial.

And it’s all in the first person. You can see everything. No one can comment on you. What could they possibly say? They’re not really there. They’re off somewhere with their own memories, in their own deaths.

You may spend eternity happily with them, and they may not even know you exist – or existed – just as before. But there is no after. There only is.

There’s this adventure and that adventure or this imagining or that one. Then there’s another and another and another or not. There’s the same happy tune, run endlessly. There’s the same obsession, fixed in your non-existent head. Or not.

You can run barefoot through meadows. You can have wings. You can zip through space or fall and never hit bottom. You can never come up for air. You don’t need air, or water, or caffeine.

You can have chocolate if you like, but it’s never really there, like sex. You can imagine good sex, the kind you always wanted or maybe even had.

You won’t need to spy or watch porn. You don’t have to sneak around in death. No one’s there to track you, unless you want to be tracked. And who could they report to anyway? There is no God unless you want one.

You can imagine him, or her, or it. Make someone in fiction your god. Someone in history. Invent a god. Make one from clay or folded paper. Make all its body parts edible. Eat a god. Snack-a-god. Healthy god. You might be better off fantasizing that girl, boy, man, woman you wanted to share eternity with.

But some people need a god, just as some need yogurt. And if you want to spend eternity imagining the iced form of that bacteria, go right ahead.

Float in your warm, bodyless gloom, pondering virtuous vegetarian thoughts. You’re already going to last forever. You may as well be pure.

Or if you want to be a little bad, broil a steak, a holy Indian steak. Brama died for your sins.

Nope, no sins. No angst. Just memories.

If you want to picture death. If you want to imagine it. If you want to pretend.