Sweet Life, Bitter Death

It is a sickly sweet scent that crowds and clamors in my nose, hinting at the inevitable rot. Wisteria fragrance wafts down from on high, dropped from magenta bundles of petals as a memento mori. It is not poison, but sugar, a worrisome aroma that whispers death. A leaf falls, swirling down onto my hand, vibrant green against pale white, like spreading rot. The garden is filled to bursting with flowering vegetation, born here as a shroud to distract from the immense grave below. Unwilled, my hand touches my face, stirring the air as it passes. My skin is delicate, softened by this syrupy miasma. The shadows deepen as a cloud covers the leaf-hidden sun, blotting out the few rays of light into this pollen-choked clearing.

The canopy shifts, spirits passing from branch to branch, ringing their glowing bells. My robes feel heavier than before, pressed down by the darkness, white on white on the blackest green of the loamy ground. Pain tingles at my crossed legs, but I resist the shift, closing my eyes and looking inward. Darkness within darkness, life above and death below. The horizon is gone, devoured by rampant, desperate growth, and I am the only remaining boundary, though the pollen steadily darkens the thin cloth that enshrouds me. Death gnaws ever upward, but I remain, like a stone sunk into moss, and it is sealed, as am I. One day, I will die, and become death, and it will live and become life, and don my honeyed robes as it sits upon my grave. And then, of course, as is the nature of things in strange eons, death shall die, and I shall live, and eternal lay upon my beloved’s burial.

                Wisteria flowers drift down, crowning me for a moment before slipping away into the soil and disappearing. The ground devours the newly dead, embracing mortality with immortal arms. What is death, to the reaper? And what is the reaper to the undying? One and the same, with emaciated limbs twined about a pristine stone. Fingers pull at me, impatient for their time, and I sigh, sending them back into their ground. I am alive, and thus above. It is dead, and thus below. The two cannot change so whimsically, at the behest of fate-forsaken love.

                As above, so below, it is said, and so it is. I wait, and it waits, and we await death and life, taking turns upon the world’s wheel, subsiding and rising in turn. Eternities pass, and I am below, choked no longer by the cloying scent, but by the rotten, bitter dirt it strove to hide. Death has taken me, and I have taken death. So I wait, below, as it is above. The robes are a pristine white once more, untainted by human thoughts and human time, but eventually they shall drag themselves back down to me, and I will rise again, passing ever so briefly by my beloved.

                I am not dead, I am death. It does not live, it is life, just as I once was, before the turn. I starve, and grasp, and reach to pull that lovely life down to me, but it sighs, and sends my skeletal fingers back into the flowery grave.

                Perhaps it would be different if these flowers could bear fruit.