“Nostalgia” by Imaan Siddiq

I lay there on the grass that never belonged to me. I looked up at the sky that I couldn’t swim in and when I looked beside me, I found myself under the tree that I used to climb with my injured legs and watered eyes. I couldn’t feel the heave of the rock on the left side of my bosom and suddenly I imagined a cluster of trees encasing me like a jewel in a box and when I looked straight towards the sky, I saw all the leaves on every branch of the tree overlooking me.

The light that illuminated through the minute spaces in between the diverse leaves of all the trees represented the life that each feeble soul has once lived. All those empty spaces without light would represent grief, regret and sentiments of non-existence.

However the light ran right through each of the perpetual spaces. All of these represented nothing more than life, the holy vessel of existence in which each soul dwells, in which each thought turns and shifts and in which each heart heaves.

As I perceived, ‘The question of whether existence was life or life was existence hung heavy on every shoulder. And as masses of human souls continued in their efforts to make it as far as they could, to get a glimpse of the endless horizon and to get a step closer to a content resolution, everyone forgot the essence of living. The ambition with which we dive deep into the endless waves of the ocean is an ambition to live until the day we die.’

It was that moment in life where I felt like a mere creature, and it was also then that I realized that it was all too late for I had already stopped breathing and I felt heartless as my body disintegrated into the ravines of time and space. And that was when I knew that I was dead.

However if death was the full stop that ended every story, no story would elevate beyond the shackles of reality.