The Smell of Coffee Attracts the Dead
Being away from everything is like being dead.
Not in a morbid or melodramatic light...just in the sense of being inaccessible and not accessing.
I had this vivid dream, years ago-I was dead. The afterlife was just my parents home. Only for the dead, like me, the ceilings were exceptionally high-small cathedral high, with a sort of inner balcony running a square around the house. And I (and occasional other wayward spirits), existed solely (souly?) in that square.
I walked around the square.
And again.
And existence was looking down-gigantically down-at my family and friends, doing day to day stuff. I am close. But I cannot interact. Cannot quite see it at their level or angle either, just looked down through my square.
And every stupid, little thing has the kind nostalgia that makes it hard to remain standing. They’d brew some coffee, and I’d be like, “Ye Gods! They’re brewing coffee. I used to brew coffee with them like that. I used to drink it out on the deck, with them, like that.”
And this went on. I occasionally took a break to comment on something with a random, wandering spirit, share a few jokes, make a few new Plutonian acquaintances-because I can be a funny-self-depreciating-charming bastard when I’m not stuck in my head-and it’s a few laughs between spooks. But they move on and by the time I turn my head again, for another comment, it’s a different face, or none at all and just me on my little inner balcony.
It was an emotionally engaging dream, that stretched through quite a bit of dreamtime, and was, oddly, very realistic. I really thought I was dead.
But I woke up.
Breakfast probably tasted very good that morning.
Well. Let’s be honest. It was lunch.
It wasn’t a horrifying dream. It was just funny, sad, and nostalgic at turns. There are some BNL songs that feel like that dream.
Anyway, where was I...
Oh yeah...Norway.
I’m away from everything and everyone. And I find myself getting little glimpses of what all my family and friends are doing...but not from the ground angle, and not really interacting. Emails and posts and Skype video-I’m looking down through my little square and saying, “Ye Gods! I used to have coffee with them like that.” Occasionally, at work, I turn away and make a comment or a joke with one of the new faces. And I wave the severed hand I keep at my desk. And I explain that, no, not all Americans have severed hands lying around (just us patriotic ones).
I’m gone. But I haven’t been forgotten (always flattering). And occasionally, my loved ones perform these odd seance rituals involving click-clacking on lettered keys, and they conjure a little, ethereal image of me or sometimes just my disembodied voice or just cryptic textual messages manifesting on the Ouija board computer screens.
The inverse perspective is a sort of post-apocalyptic plotline where I’m the only one left alive, contacting the dead with my own rituals (only in my inner movie, I don’t fuck up Richard Matheson’s book).
And then... My God! Are you having coffee?
So I thought of that dream (on the off chance that I wasn’t laying the parallels on thick). Again, I’m not invoking a death comparison for a sense of macabre angst...but more for the Weirdness of the experience. It’s been Weird.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this.