vous êtes belles, mais vous êtes vides

Eschatology

i.
You remember drowning, the slow heavy weight of the water on your chest, the sunlight through the water as the world faded to black.

Somewhere in your thousand years someone had told you a story about a frozen goddess from the north who watches over the souls of the drowned. “She has a pearl net,” they had said, “to catch the dying, and she tends them and ferries them to their own heavens.”

But your only god is go, and so this drowned lady had forgotten you, had missed you, somehow—because this is not heaven. You are still here, a thousand years forgotten, and still you remember drowning; what it felt like, at last, to die.

A bitter irony, you think. For that is all you ever feel, anymore.

ii.
Someone had asked you (before everything, before blue blue water and forgetting how to breathe) what you thought happened to people after they died. You hadn't thought on it for long; you were only a child then, anyway, and children never think too long or too hard about things that they cannot understand. “Probably,” you had said, flippantly, “the same sort of things that happened to them while they were alive.”

You were partially right, in the end, but mostly wrong; because what happened to you when you died was five days and five nights underwater, the cold wash of currents through your being hollowing you, emptying you, so that in the end you were washed clean of everything but the clear lines of your go, the memory of white and black stones. You no longer could see the light slanting through the blue above you, but only the hand of god, so close and so very far away, and you wanted.

This is what dying feels like: an emptiness, an endless, endless need. And forgetting.

iii.
Even at the last, even as he was fading into darkness, walking over a bridge that you had never seen and heading off into some kind of peace that you had never known, Torajirou did not ask you what happened to people after they died.

You smile as you think this, because you know that he did not ask because he knew you did not know; because you, after all the years and decades and centuries, were still a child, caught up in a need that you did not understand.

iv.
Then there had been the board, of course, which had not been like dying (which was ambiguous, which was full of curved edges and a fading blue light). The board was straight lines and black and white stones like islands, like stars in a universe that started and ended with want, and was tinted with the memories of all the things that you had regretted, all the people you had left behind.

(And sometimes someone would pass by and shudder, or give the board an odd look and you would whisper, can you hear me? but no one ever could, no one could.

So you waited.)

v.
Hikaru does not ask (and you do not expect him to ask), “Sai, what happens to people when they die?”, but you see the question sometimes lingering at the corners of his eyes, something just out of sight but hovering within reach.

You never tell him, either, what dying is like—even as you feel yourself beginning to fade, even as you feel the end approaching—because you are a child, still, really, afraid of a good many things; both too old and too young for everything that has ever happened to you.

But there are things, in your thousand years, that you have learned—and one of those things is that the hand of god cannot be played by one person, alone; another is that, though you still want, in a vague, nostalgic way, though you still wish it could be you, there are other things (the smile on Hikaru's face, the look of triumph as he sees—) that you want more. And so though you know your last parting will be sorrowful, it will not be bitter, and you will not regret—you will not regret.

And at the last, watching him sleep, watching the flags snap-flap in the wind, you think that, though you will never tell Hikaru what dying is like, if you had, you might have told him that it did not feel like going home.

It felt like you had never left.