And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away…
— Revelation 21:4
PARADISE
Imagine a path of lights, guiding some poor soul into a light that is greater and more powerful than the lights the path was made of. Imagine a garden. Imagine the Garden. Hello, Heaven. This is where I am. Heaven is a verb, albeit an obsolete one— I heaven, I’m heavening, I had heavened— meaning to beautify or to transport to the abode of God. It’s not relevant to what I’m talking about, except that it is, because there’s an obsolete usage of “abode” as a noun meaning foretelling and another obsolete usage of “abode” as an intransitive verb meaning ominous, neither of which are words with particularly good connotations. With this context, Heaven could be the foreboding future that God lives in. Or, if we’re being simple about it, the dire fate.
Heaven also means Paradise. This is probably much nicer to say than saying that Heaven is the bad ending to a good book, except, of course, that it’s not actually that much nicer. If you trace something back far enough, it gets ugly. This is no surprise— you can ruin anything if you cut too deep into it. When we cut into Paradise, we find the Avestan word pairi-daêza-, which roughly translates to walled enclosure. This is a neutral statement, depending on if you like walls or not. For some people, walled enclosure is synonymous with safety, either because the world outside the walls is kept out or because whatever is within the walls is kept in. It’s about separation. For a wild animal, though, walled enclosure is synonymous with trapped. This is a version of a dire fate.
I’ll let you decide how wild I am.
So here we are. Hello, Heaven. Hello, Paradise. It’s the kind of day that makes you understand why people used to think the sky was a dome sitting over flat land. The sun is hot and colorless in a perfect blue sky, raining down the type of light that makes everything seem paler. It’s warm enough to have your arms exposed. Not a single cloud in sight. Cue the birdsong. Cue the budding flowers. Cue a gentle breeze, moving at the perfect speed to change things up without making you cold. It’s lovely.
It’s also giving me a fucking migraine. Dressed in a translucent white nightgown, I stand in the yard like Persephone returning from six months in the Underworld, squinting hard into the brightness. I haven’t been outside during the day in a long time— the feeling of ground instead of floor beneath my feet is still jarring. Behind me is an exoskeleton. I’m playing pretend that I’m a ghost cracked open to the soft white meat of an inside, which is not a hard thing to pretend to be, especially when the sun is washing me into a teneral sort of milkiness. I’m actually the first girl in the world to undergo ecdysis. It’s no big deal, but they’re giving me a medal for it tomorrow, so yeah. Cue the applause. I’m thinking about the way that zoos used to be, the wild things surrounded by nothing but brick and metal, pacing endlessly behind bars. The illustrations of zoos in vintage children’s books always look comically evil, an absurd contrast with the nonchalance that the authors typically have towards the treatment of the animals. Lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) living and dying in jail cells. And it was Paradise because they couldn’t reach us. Hallelujah.
I don’t really have anything to do. Half of the world is dead, yet to resurrect itself, and the other half is viscerally lush from gorging itself on rainfall and erratic sunlight. Livor mortis comes to mind. Everything looks like a bruise, and knowing this gets me nowhere. I orbit around the yard for lack of something better to do. This is why I’m pretending to be a ghost, not living flesh. I’m some kind of haunting. I walk without intention, moving in endless, inscrutable lines across the grass, tracing the same path over and over. I’m going in circles— “circle”, which comes from the Ancient Greek word kírkos, which means ring. You can get married to repetition. I would know. I pace the length of the fence over and over. Crimson and clover.
Hello, Paradise. Hello, Heaven. On the slab of concrete that functions as a patio, there’s a dead fly. I know that if I touched it, if I pressed down on it, it would crackle under the pressure as I killed it again— a lifetime of clearing off windowsills tells me this, that it would be near weightless and paper-dry. I won’t do it, though, because the fly is covered in ants, and killing ants is a cardinal sin. They dig into the chitinous armor that covers its stomach for little meats that they will take home to their children. I’ve never seen ants go for a fly. Things must be desperate. I stop circling my enclosure for a moment, watching small bodies disappear into another small body. The ants, climbing their way out of the tiny corpse, breadcrumb their way back to their nest with their tinier prizes held over their tiniest heads. That fly is big enough to be a god to them. Maybe it is— history dictates that we have a habit of venerating the things we eat.
Well, good for them. The cycle repeats itself. You can marry that, too. It does make me wonder about the Garden of Eden, though. If nothing died there and all the creatures and plants lived in perfect peace and harmony, nothing hurting another thing, then the Garden must have been surviving only because of an excess of divine will. Hunger must not have existed, or all things were vegetarian and lived off fallen berries and fruits, or death just didn’t exist yet so nothing could starve. It doesn’t matter, though. Here we are, dying and eating meat.
I wonder what the first thing to die was. Was it the lamb Abel sacrificed to God? Was there something before it that returned to rest? What was the first thing that knew it was going to die, that knew death was what happened to things that die? I wonder if a leopard’s brain has enough awareness to understand the concept of self-destruction. I wonder if a wolf can comprehend suicide. Does it mean anything to live if you don’t have a choice?
Again, though, it doesn’t matter. They’re eating the fly anyways. Hello, Paradise. Hello, Heaven.
HEAVEN
I hated Heaven as a kid, or at least I hated the idea of it. I’m sure that’s not a surprise. When your concept of Christianity comes from a Bible and not a religious leader— and when you somehow come to the conclusion that Heaven is God’s stomach by the time you’re eight— you get all sorts of ideas about how things are. The Bible ends on a triumphant note, with the arrival of Jesus and the eradication of all pain and sorrow. I took issue with that. I was a bit of a mean kid, to myself if not to others, and I liked my pain and sorrow. It was comfortable. If you did it right, it could be downright ecstatic. It felt good to work yourself into a bit of a strop. It was fun to get beat up by your cousin. The word that I was looking for was catharsis— “catharsis”, which comes from the Ancient Greek word kátharsis, meaning to cleanse or to purge. The apocalypse and Second Coming meant no more catharsis. Of course, it also meant that there was no more need for catharsis, but that was even more frightening, because it meant that something was going to be taken from us so thoroughly that we would forget we ever wanted it. Our feelings. Our history, which contains a thousand sadnesses we can’t deny. Revelation feels like cheating, or maybe like being dead. Being clean means nothing without the process of cleaning.
I hated Heaven. Heaven wept. Heaven is weeping. It’s thunderstorming— sickly purple lightning is heavening the southern horizon right now, accompanied by a sheet of rain. I hated Heaven, but I liked the heavens, because weather cycles seem to understand the importance of catharsis. A good storm always feels a bit like lancing a wound. It’s an open sort of sickness. Tears and blood and pus. Anti-festering actions. This is a pain that makes things better in the long run.
So here I am on the window seat in complete darkness, or at least as close to complete darkness as it can get in the city, counting the distance between the lightning and the thunder. I’m trying to be nice, to give the world a shoulder to cry on. Little Miss Sympathetic Ear. It’s penance. I’m trying to get myself forgiven for something I haven’t done yet. In Heaven, everything is fine— on top of being an adjective, “fine” is also a noun, meaning a sum of money one pays as a punishment. This means that “in Heaven, everything is fine” is a synonym for you are destined to be punished by the entirety of life. All must go to the dire fate. To the walled enclosure. Maybe I was right for having thought that Heaven is just the sensation of God digesting a soul, of breaking it down into something He can feed off of. Maybe I was right to hate it. Maybe I’m just an asshole that likes to ruin things for myself. All valid possibilities, but none of them change the fact that I am trying to be nice, and I’m not sure that it’s working.
Here’s a flash of lightning. I count up the seconds— one, two, three, four. I’ve just hit twenty-three when the thunder comes, which it does with relish, rattling the windows like a poltergeist. I wait for another flash, then count my way into the other shoe dropping.
The industrial boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries gave us that phrase, you know. More people started living in cities; as a result, more people started living in apartments and tenements. When someone came home, whoever lived below them could hear them shuck off their shoes, the first one almost immediately followed by the second. Thump, thump. Picnic, lightning. It’s become synonymous with the idea of waiting for some (typically dour) inevitability to happen. You can’t get it over with, you can’t prevent it, you can’t do anything about it. You just have to wait. And I’m not saying that the thunder is a bad thing; the point is that, in the space between the lightning and the thunder, there’s an invisible line connecting me to every person in the entire world who couldn’t untie themself from the tracks before the train came. I’m thinking about the word “abode”— there’s another obsolete usage of it that means omen. Hello, Heaven. Hello, dire fate.
Lightning strikes again, a bolt cresting into a place that I can’t reach. I can’t go downstairs. I can’t go outside. I hope that no one’s home has caught on fire. I whisper the numbers out loud because I have nothing better to do— one, two, three, four. The other shoe finally drops and rumbles its way across the sky. More lightning comes a few seconds later. Bored of English, I start counting in French, trying to recall the classes I took in high school. Cinq, six, sept, huit. I start counting in Japanese after the cycle starts all over again, only to realize that I’ve forgotten the words for four and five. I go back to French for the next flash. I alternate between English and French for the one after that. I switch to Spanish soon after.
Hello, Paradise. I feel like something bad is going to happen to me— I feel like something bad has happened, and it hasn’t reached me yet, but it’s on its way. Hello, Heaven. Catharsis is inaccessible to me, with the way I’m living now. I don’t cry. My face doesn’t move. Maybe the Second Coming won’t be so bad. I’ve got my index finger in my mouth because I accidentally sliced it open on a piece of broken glass, and it tastes like nothing, nothing at all. You should hear the way the rain is coming down— it’s almost Biblical, properly pouring. God’s tears in Heaven. I think I’d die if I tried lancing my wounds. I think I’d bleed to death if I tried to get the poison out. Do you understand? I’d just go right out of myself. I think I would die.
In a mirror of a hundred other days— there’s an invisible line connecting me to every time I’ve been here, and I’m getting all tangled up in it, because I have a bad habit of getting tangled— I choked to death on my own umbilical cord as an infant, you know— I lie in fetal position and wait for the other shoe to drop. Hello, Paradise. Hello, Heaven.
One.
Two.
Three…