Paradise

Maria Anderson

Welcome, my friend. We have long awaited your arrival.

Bright, glaring light that pierces the inner Geist. Clouds surround you, constricting your lungs.

Family and dear friends are here. The wounds that caused their deaths are faded but not gone, and shimmer grotesquely. Faint lights fester deep in young girls' poisoned stomachs, necks bruised from strangulation, wavering dusty tumors, skin lightly stained by blood and spinal fluid, crushed inner organs glowing through bruises. Those who died of old age just gleam, their bodies ablaze and trembling.

Small children play, but the games lack meaning. A feeling of emptiness pervades the saffron sunsets. They do look beautiful from up here.

An eternal existence, without purpose or desire, for who desires what he already has? No need to search for knowledge, for you're in paradise.

Every book in the grand marble libraries is empty, void even of the subtlest of inks. The scholars have become drunks, wastrels at the paradise's gleaming bars, swaying down alleys reciting poems of the greats, the sweet scent of their vomit wafting down through the city. The musicians feel insignificant next to this purity, and drag their instruments around and cough like cats.

Here in paradise, happiness exists as a current state. There is no longer the forward search, the momentum, the strivings to work toward the future, to set your life in motion like a moth towards a light, ever progressing, staving off small joys so the massive, all consuming event that will happen in the future, the summation of the life's work and the moment at which you promise yourself that you will be content, if you have this job, that girl, that object of material value. There is contentment not to be realized later, but registered now, a deep feeling of satisfaction coiling and uncoiling like a snake in the chest.

There is never suffering, never a moment in which contentment is not throbbing out your ears, pumping through those supple veins. Dostoevsky, who as a child was ordered to stand by his alcoholic father while he slept and swat any flies that chanced to land on his body, chortles smugly and prattles on to the drunks and a few sullen children. He makes them buy him whiskeys and egg creams. Dostoevsky smokes, and from his cigarettes comes the smoke of burning Burmese villages and ancient ransacked temples and fallen baobabs.

The glare of all this light, this good, fervent, ecstatic light burns your eyes. Everywhere you look, you see a red blur, like you've been looking at the sun too long. Your eyes sting. Something is wrong. You can't put your finger on it. Your body is in a euphoric state, but a vague depression sets in.

All is bleary bright, empty and void, acorns and sparrows. These are the hours that the clocks do not encompass. These are the lost hours. And they last

forever,

until the very concept of time ends.


© Maria Anderson 2008

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maria Anderson is a young writer in year two at Brown University. She enjoys shisha, Peru, the movie Fern Gully, and making naan. Stray dogs follow her around when she travels and she does not know why.