The Alchemist

This is a very short story about a possible afterlife.

I was alone to my thoughts one evening as I walked through the fog that eerily crept along the river bank. I went to the river often to clear my head. It was a strange irony that I should walk into a fog bank. My mind was in a similar state. How odd I normally love the fog. It gives you the feeling of being hidden from the rest of the world. Always eyes watching, always ears listening.

I generally preferred my own company. The sun I observed was beggining to fall towards the horizon. Twilight was favorite part of the 24 hour cycle. It was a strange and symbolic time for me. It was that time inbetween two worlds. Night and day. One in shadows and darkness and the other bathed in revealing light. I saw this as some dance between opposites like the masculine and feminine caught in a sensual embrace, where one engulfs the other but in a cyclical fashion.

With both the cloak of the coming night and fog that I found myself shrouded in, I slipped on a wet log and hit my head first into a rock on the bank of the river. I fell into darkness and all became cold and empty. I had to fight to stay warm.

I then found myself standing in the fog. I walked along the rivers edge until I came upon a bridge that I had not seen before. It too was engulfed in the mist and all I could see were the shadows made by the halos of the lanterns lining the bridge. I could hear the river. But it sounded odd, so did the wind and the feeling of the ground at the bottom of my feet. Once I realized it seemed odd the bridge began to dematerialize beneath me but gravity had no affect.

Then a realization manifested in me. I found that I was dying and I was finding difficulty letting go. My subconscious mind had fervently held onto ancient symbols of the collective unconscious. The bridge was a crossing from the physical world into a realm of non-existence. Somehow I knew it wasn't an afterlife. It was my mind projecting images to deny that I was going to die. But I didn't feel afraid atleast I didn't think so. I didn't feel anything at all.

The less I resisted the more I left the material world. My mind was now separating from my body and that corporeal form was now fading away. I saw without eyes a different world around me. I saw the wave and particles that made light. The suns energy made visible to me. Cosmic rays and other types of radiation could be seen. A bright conflagration of lights and colors.

My vision grew with intensity as I could see individual atoms that made all the carbon based lifeforms around me. Thousands more times vision magnified and I could see subatomic particles dancing all around. But not just "see" them, I could sense they had a life force of their own. All alive with voices of their own. An orchestra of life was all around me splendour sublime.

Gravity again was denied me as I was propelled out of the atmosphere into what I thought was the vaccum of space. But that notion too was denied me. I saw forces and particles at play. Non which science's instruments could detect nor witness its effect. The universe wasn't nearly as empty, it was a botanical garden of energies that was far beyond the human imagination.

The earth seemed but as just a planet, no great purpose or destiny. The father star in his brilliance burned amoungst the other celestial spheres. I was hurled into the sun where I saw the process of nuclear fusion. Hydrogen nuclei collided to create helium. I could feel all 650 billion nuclei being fused every second. But I having no body to interact with the stimuli was unable to feel anything. I found myself not even caring.

Again I was cast out of the galaxy passing the gas giants and into a whole other system. A saw the destruction of a star and formation of a stellar nursery. Stars were being born and they cried their first light. And the while I was forgetting who I was. It was irrelevant now without a body and it was then I found myself at a cross road. A fork in the cosmic journey. I still hadn't let go, even though I was dead I had the desire to feel death of my mind. And in that moment I died to myself and my consciousness like my body faded away into the cosmos where I become one with the living universe.