Back From the Dead

I died and I came back. I couldn’t breathe and that fist-sized muscle in my chest pounded a hole through my thoughts and I beat my fist on the wall because I could no longer form words and the ambulance came and the lights were so bright and there I was, walking serenely in a land made of gold where everyone smiled like rainbows and there was nothing that was not made of wonder and goodness but I stepped back through the shimmering curtain to tell my beloved I chose to stay.

Sometimes I regret that choice.

I wish I remembered more. I still see that nurse in a blue smock who walked past the curtained opening of my ER cubicle over and over. I’m told that she didn’t, or that she only walked past once, but I keep seeing her stuck on repeat, right to left, like one of those carnival shooting gallery ducks. But that’s about it. I just remember golden light.

My beloved tells me I demanded sex from him right there in the ER, and that I went ahead without him and had multiple screaming orgasms. I’d like to remember that. I’ve never had multiple screaming orgasms and that would be a memory I could carry with me a long time. Instead, all I remember is the light, that golden light like liquid sunshine that poured over everything in the Otherworld, a magical Midas that turned death into gold.

They tell me I can feel that gold right here, but it’s hard for me to believe.

That’s actually the secret, though. Like Rumplestiltskin who spun straw into gold, I can spin the black mud of my life into light, and from that light I can weave a new life. I think I almost know how to do it.