Perhaps if you never wonder about life, but simply run through it, dying would make some sense. It is like suddenly hitting a brick wall comprised of guilt trips and creeping memories reminding you how mortal you are – really, death makes all the sense in the world if you do not question its reason, or why it hurts and why it is inevitable on every path – Mia was sitting on a bench by the sea, staring at drunken people on the party, all dressed in white linen clothes reflecting a higher social status and a merciless force of the summer sun, all shouting the screams of joy with an honest effort to forget about their everyday sorrows. She was listening to this soft parade while she was thinking about the fisherman’s rotting body.

 

Mia came from Prague earlier that week, loaded with Czech liquor and salt cravings. Love made her cry for the last couple of months and the boiling sun in Prague had inflamed her brain and depleted her lonely heart. She couldn’t wait to be in the water again, after spending a year in the city of dry skins and swollen eyes, where cheap alcohol hinders worries of people lost in the night. Salt would cure the miseries of a youthful body: salt of the sea, salty tomatoes with olive oil for dinner after a day spent on a beach, sweat from running under the sun of July and tears from laughing with friends.

 

Of all the things from her homeland, Mia missed conversations with Tomas, her father, the most. He was about to celebrate his 50th birthday on the 18th of July and the celebration was the main reason of Mia’s arrival back home. The half-century fiesta with fifty people and twice as much liters of wine was planned for the weekend: a boat ride to the restaurant on the coast of an island with endless hours of indulging in local seafood specialties and mournful songs. Mia was looking forward to spending some time with her family, especially with Tomas, whose mind she knew better than her own. A man with round dark eyes hidden under the weight of knowledge, blackened by omnipresent death, softened by love. And it were precisely the thoughts on love that she missed sharing with him, the newfound discoveries of a heart sighing for someone on a long distance, revelations of the soul which her father had foreseen a long time ago. But being the stubborn and timid Virgo, overly shy and painfully romantic as she was, Mia had to experience the separation in love on her own in order to trust Tomas when he had told her love would change her world. She remembered their conversations on love with the greatest clarity, since this theme had always tended to be the subject of her mockery. After a cycle of beautiful companionship comes a cycle of deep shit, and Mia was trying her best to outgrow this misery, to relearn how to kiss with others. The only one who could give Mia a guided insight into the mind of another man was Tomas, whose soul was sometimes bizarrely of the same ancient origin as Ali’s, the man Mia fell in love with. It is why Mia expected that Tomas’ sharp words of rational comfort would be the secret ingredient for the completion of her healing. She came home for the confirmation that it is fine if things end, love included. 

 

Since she experienced the e-motion sickness, Mia has come to understand Tomas in a bit more honest manner, especially his dedication to romanticism poets and his loving obsession with Vanda, Mia’s mother. What was still very difficult to grasp for Mia was not the heart of her father, but the world he lived in. She couldn’t share the burden of his existence, the daily interventions in God’s plans, the life of intensive care medicine adrenalin rushes and sleepless nights. The constant exposure to death made him disturbingly sad, distant, with pieces of shattered happiness stabbed into his delicate boyish heart. Something about seeing souls fly above the meat must make a human being wonder about the meaning of all this.

 

To eliminate the pain was Tomas’ life mission, vocation and his job – taming the pain so death doesn’t come as a scream but rather as a warm breeze taking one further on the ride – he was an anesthesiologist, whose world of medicaments and astounding terminology was very remote to Mia’s bohemian bubble. At the same time Tomas was a drunk, a side of him Mia fully comprehended. They shared the same emotional attachment to all things, all eyes, all places they see, which would sometimes make them incapable of living in existing reality. To drink was a double-edged sword: what was thought to be an intoxicated contemplation and a creative venture into the hidden corners of psyche would most of the times turn into nothing more than a delirium of a pissed idiot; what appeared to be a charming nocturnal activity would prove as an attempt for escape from the loudness of friends, and friends have always had problems tolerating it. Everybody has expiration date in tolerating drunks, even the drunks get eventually annoyed by their drinking.

 

Nevertheless, Mia and her father were soft people, both blinded by the virtue of fatal love, both intoxicated with immortality and higher causes.

 

The birthday fiesta of Tomas began on Saturday morning, the hottest weekend in the year. At noon, white linen people gathered around the boat in the harbor, waiting for the celebration to be officially launched so they can rapidly numb their clogged senses with cool booze. The first hour was a polite joyous mingling, and Tomas was happy to see faces of people he considered to be the closest friends. Some of them knew him since he was a clumsy silent boy with long black hair and vivid imagination, climbing rooftops and breaking arms in various attempts of flying. Some of them had befriended him in high school, where they had witnessed the first cracks of innocence and the early formations of alcoholism. Most of the guests on the party were paired, wives being naturally close friends of Vanda, husbands friends of Tomas. Marek, Mia’s younger brother, a medicine student and a pensive bodhisattva with quiet - sometimes too quiet - eyes and eyebrows rich as forest, was together with Mia the only person on the boat without a wedding ring or a stomach ulcer from excessive stress and sins. Marek and Mia were observing the crowd, occasionally stealing cigarettes from their mother and making jokes on behalf of this day.

 

The boat hasn’t even made a full circle around the island when the drunk boys in midlife crisis started jumping in the sea, enjoying the moments of their precious free time, genuinely happy to jump and at least for an hour release the teenagers within them. Their wives politely continued to sip watered white wines, hiding fat under the clothes they like no more, but still wear since it is somehow prescribed to fit their age. A gloomy, unpredictable, bitter burden of menopause has eclipsed their souls and forced them to grow old very rapidly, becoming mothers once again, only this time to full-grown men they courageously continue to call husbands. It is painful to be under the weight of this much self-control, Mia thought. No wonder they all have auto-immune sicknesses and rashes and unbearable allergies and black clouds underneath their tired eyes – they have imprisoned themselves in categories and roles predetermined by their families, towns, countries, and the day they said “yes” with uncertainty, the “yes” that rarely resonates with unconditional trust, they have enslaved themselves under the word “wife”, without ever really hearing their own name again or the little screams of the wild woman inside. These gentle, clever and caring women have become the protectors of the past, of the times when love still might had been a burning desire. Nowadays, when their men are floating in the sea of self-pity and regrets, with bellies growing larger and larger as days on Earth pile, the wives are the ones holding them above the surface, for they have learned to drown their sorrows and mastered the art of shutting up.

 

The party moved into the bay and the picturesque fish restaurant turned into an open-air dress code discotheque. A bit kitschy, thought Mia, but very fun nonetheless. A welcome drink upon arrival has been served as a reminder the celebration hasn’t started yet, although most of the guests were already slightly conquered by wine vertigo and the unbearable heat. Everyone sat at the huge tables reserved for the celebration, everyone except two Tomas’ friends, who after disappearing for a few moments, arranged an improvised concert stage in front of the tables and started playing rock – the nostalgic melodies from the time Tomas had considered music as one of his passions and musicians as serious kind of people. Although his tendency to slip into delusional conservatism and premature oldness has alienated him from his youthful self, in a state of complete drunkenness Tomas was still able to find the rebellious young man within. Surrounded by friends and family, he was singing as if on a stadium. Occasionally, he would throw Mia an inviting look to join him in his solo concert, but Mia was not only too stuck up to be silly, but also too comfortable being on the side of the observer. Always, in all situations, which perhaps could have become a more charming story if only she would step in and become actively involved, Mia would remain outside the fire, gently caressed by the flame and endeared by the energy, but outside nonetheless, never really a part of what was happening. A passive component of the event, but an active creator of the story later retold. To watch people dancing was more sensual than to dance; to listen to people talking was more valuable than to talk; to observe people eating was more fulfilling than to eat. Amused by the spontaneity of people’s laughter and amazed by the repetitive patterns of human behavior, she could sit for hours without a single motion and silently stare.

 

After the dinner which served as a short break from boisterous drinking, the guests were fueled with roaring energy and the party turned to be a blast. Tomas’s friends, three respectful and somber-looking lawyers, unzipped their shirts soaked in sweat and started chasing random passengers. They were frightening them with incomprehensible lyrics and bestial screams, dancing topless around elderly tourists who would curiously stop to see where was the music coming from, and who is the lucky person celebrating birthday with such a rampant crowd. Marek and Mia enjoyed this rare occasion of seeing their parents so relaxed and free, and they laughed playing the guess-who-is-going-to-pass-out-first game; they both bet on the topless lawyers, even though by now most of the guests seemed as if on the verge of a stroke, with faces purple as plums in šljivovica.

 

Mia’s thoughts were multiplying rapidly; at one point she realized that she really likes switching places and travelling. How great it is that two days ago she was miserably airless in the continental climate, but now she has her feet tickled by the sea. She thought about the train ride from Prague. It was a long ride, which normally takes about twelve hours, but this time it was even longer. There was a strange accident on the railway just outside of Prague and the train was unable to continue the journey, until four hours later an obstacle from the road was removed. An accident – but accidents are failed cosmic experiments and the suicide of an elderly man is everything but an accident. The man jumped under the train, ending his heavy-weighted life, gone Karenina on the world, light as a breeze. There is something frighteningly courageous and respectful in a conscious decision of a living being to end his life so abruptly, to plan the defeat of the physical existence and accept the mortality. Or perhaps the thirsty lust for immortal heights is the final push to jump? Mia pondered how seemingly irrelevant is that she was part of someone’s death plan, the passenger in the train carrying the man to heaven. Her imagination took her even further, into more profound spheres of her mind, and she discovered that the omen of death had already been revealed to her. It was left on her soft neck, to be exact, in a form of a love bite made by a man who sees the dead.

 

 

Two days before she sat on the train, Mia met Sam, the Latin-American painter whom she occasionally slept with couple of years ago. The meeting wasn’t random. Of all the bars in the city, she was pretty sure which one she ought to avoid if she wouldn’t want to open the Pandora box again and start another cycle of mindless fucking. But there was a strong mysterious force rattling in her gonads that night, almost as if whispering a symphony of lustful adventure to her ears, and it felt so good to hear something other than blue notes of tearful longing. The moment she had stepped into the bar and saw Sam being caught up in his well-known slimy flirtation game, Mia remembered all of the nights she had spend in his cave, all the injuries on her back and scars on her neck, clothes ruined from paint and stories he told her under the influence of blood-stirring dusty substances. Pure opposite of Ali, the man she loves; violent, narcissistic, restless, fearful – perhaps it was why now she felt so inexplicably drawn to him. Both born under the constellation of a Water-barer, both raised by the sea, they were dark-skin formations of masculine energy with completely opposite electricity: Ali baring the light, courage and wisdom of a lion with the essence of love in his eyes, playful and pensive at the same time; Sam, the loner with madness residing on his eyebrows and the darkest thoughts comprising his being, thoughts creeping through his thick skin in form of thirsty scorpions and full moon tattoos. One has to taste the darkness in order to appreciate the light, Mia thought, so she sat at the bar, ordered a drink and in a matter of few hours went home with Sam, to be devoured by evil.

 

In one of the moments of lucidity and honesty, while lying naked on the bed, Sam told Mia something that can be summed up as the story of his life – the underlying sound of his sorrow, the basic tone of his insanity. “I am the death twin”, he told her, “and that’s why I see the dead”. The mystery in his voice awakened Mia’s senses and she was listening attentively. She remembered that the first night they slept together Sam revealed to her how he sometimes sees people who died. A minor detail, which she had a hard time believing. Sam told her about a woman who was pregnant with twin boys. In the fifth month of pregnancy, one of the boys choked with the umbilical cord and remained dead in the belly, shrinking to rotten pieces beside his living twin, until in the seventh month the surviving brother was taken out and delivered into the world. The surviving twin was Sam, and his first experience while the consciousness was forming in its earliest states was the smell of death. The curse of living as a shelter for two sibling spirits with the guilt nibbling on his intestines, forcing him to see life only as a prolonged choking, has made his hands crude, unable to touch a girl without hurting her. And Mia understood right away why Sam shrieks of evil, and why Ali has such a sweet taste. What resonates throughout Ali’s being is love, something golden in its purest essence; love towards people, love towards animals, love towards dead girlfriend and love towards Mia. His heart being comprised of the souls of so many women with cheeks warm from excess sweetness, no wonder he radiates with light. That was the contrast between them, the core principle of difference: Sam loves death, while Ali will die from love.

 

Mia felt scared with Sam, and she knew why. She was afraid of herself. It was her conscious decision to flirt with death. The death twin while resting in her womb had reversed the wheel of fortune, letting Mia close to darkness. The marks on her body weren’t the traces of a sensual play but injuries left by someone injured in a much more severe way. Omnipresent death – it is the reason why the light goes out from one’s eyes.

 

 

The birthday party was at the peak when Julian, the best man of Tomas – and also his longest lasting friend – was invited on the improvised stage to deliver a speech. Julian and Tomas met on a playground in the neighborhood where they both used to live. They were five years old, and they wanted to escape from home. Julian was very practical in building things since his father was a well-known boat-builder, while Tomas was the visionary of the escape plan. After couple of weeks of continuous meetings on the playground and building a wooden ship from branches found near by the river, the Huckleberry Finn raft adventure ended pretty unsuccessfully – the boys were exposed by Julian’s mother and banned from seeing each other. Forty-five years later, and two boys were still loyal friends, though never again boat owners, and never again brave enough to escape.

 

Julian started talking about their childhood, when all of a sudden a panicking tourist ran onto the stage and snatched the microphone from his hand. “Quickly! Quickly! Is there a doctor?” she yelled. “Please, quickly, there!” The scent of excitement pierced the salty air. Everyone stood up on their feet and stared with nervousness and curiosity at the boat the tourist was pointing at. Tomas ran towards it and Marek quickly followed. The waiter came outside on the terrace holding a gigantic birthday cake. A wave of commotion and panic has spread around the bay.

 

Among numerous wooden boats and small yachts, two women were yelling towards the direction of the restaurant, calling for the attention. An old fisherman collapsed of a heat stroke. Tomas and Marek jumped on the tiny boat where the fisherman was lying motionless. The colors of his face painfully reminded Marek of the exhibits in the pathology class. Marek started massaging the heart of the fisherman, while Tomas was injecting the adrenaline needles into his neck. Father and son were reanimating what was left from the fisherman. Adrenaline rush joined them into a healing creature, more alive than ever before. Marek was high. The smell of the rotting body has been injected into his tissue and the calling to save the disappearing man triggered adrenaline explosion in his own veins, making him realize that his future will be similar as his father’s. The determination, precision and mastery of the skill performed by Tomas endeared Marek and his loyalty towards him became even firmer. Tomas wasn’t a father anymore, an imposed idol or an authority that has to be obeyed just because they tell you in school you have to listen to the father and the father knows best; no, from that moment, sharing the holiness of stranger’s blood on their hands, Tomas became Marek’s teacher. The reason why this happened now, on this kind of occasion, Marek could not have guessed, but he knew this was his defining moment – the first death on his hands. The same hands to massage the heart of a stranger are the same hands that pray the silent prayer are the same hands to move the singing strings are the same hands to caress a girl’s cheeks – ten fingers capable of construction of something new are always the same ten fingers that destroy someone’s universe.

 

Fisherman was dead and it was impossible to save his decaying heart. Two women he left behind, his wife and teenage daughter, sat on the dock besides his corpse and prayed the words of redemption to heavens. Death of a “wife” was the birth of a “widow” – the black veil will soon replace the colorful scarf on her head. Girl will grow without her father, sharing the destiny of Tomas, who also in the same age was left alone with the broken mother. Everyone looking at what was going have slowly left the dock and got back to their seats in the restaurant. Marek came in silence and sat besides Mia, with eyes forever changed. The party continued and the band started playing the same tunes, while the grieving women cried on the dock. Tomas was the only one left standing besides them. He took a white sheet that someone had left by the boat and used it as a blanket to hide the inanimate body from the rest of the world. He hugged the widow and covered the dead. Observing from the distance, Mia saw what it means to die.

 

The moment we are dead we become it – when the soul is out of the flesh, the flesh gets stiff, no prana. Perhaps we would be rocks if we weren’t burning with desire to love. Without the need, we would be still, motionless, as trees. Love is vivid and palpable and it is certainly possible to recognize if one has grown in the fruitful softness of love. Just as soil is inanimate without the energy of water and air, which makes trees grow and flowers penetrate through the surface of the earth into the vastness of space, so is the body of a human being lifeless without the force of love, which plants a fruit after penetration into the sacred womb and makes a new life form grow. Love stays on the cheeks, it is why the dead are pale. Love stays forever, or until heat stroke doesn’t end your adventure on a random day, until Sun, the god of life, doesn’t make you shit into the sea – because fishermen die close to their victims, fish, another karmic giggle of the cosmos. How absurd creatures human beings tend to be, to spend their whole lives worshipping cleanliness but when death comes, the moment when soul is finally free, body’s first reaction is shitting.

 

Tomas returned to the party, drank a shot of whisky and leaped into the arms of Vanda, a beautiful woman with eyes lowered and wrinkled from worry, and they danced to the song that tells the story of her hometown. Their white clothes merged into one as they were slowly capturing the rhythm of the mellow mandolina. Sweat was dripping on Vanda’s shoulder from the forehead of Tomas. She was there to remind him not everything will decay as the body on the dock, not everything will vanish or turn into air or pass as a momentary friction. She will stay with him, through all his defeats, even when things don’t look like heaven. She will take him in, devoted and gentle, in her arms, between her legs. The smell of blood, booze or betrayal has no effect on her decision to love, and can never reverse the millisecond that had generated two new lives – her decision to give him children.

 

The fruit of the womb of that woman, who is now caressing the cheeks of her man, is Mia. It must be it, the reason behind Mia’s sensitivity, the fuel of her romanticism; it must be love. Its certainty soaked Mia’s eyes. Her tears were salty as the sea that killed the old fisherman, as the sea Ali smells by the shores of a distant country. And she knew, there is no need for words, there is never a need for words, senses are enough to communicate with all living things on the planet, wherever they are. The fragrance of two sweaty entangled souls, the life-giver and the life-saver, joint in the eternal dance, just as in the moments Mia and Marek were conceived, was the solitary proof of love Mia had been searching for. It was her father telling her the words spoken long time ago; it was Ali giving her kisses by crossing in another dimension; it was the universe watering her eyes and filling them with faith.

 

It’s strange how we never feel that much alive as when we love, but at the same time we feel like dying from love. Is it possible to die from love? Maybe, when the burning symbiosis of love and flesh becomes too dangerous to maintain. When life becomes too heavy, a burden contained with large magnitude but no direction to follow, when the mass of the burden flattens our tiny bodies, making us little all over again by regressing into the state of a baby. In moments of great scare we seek for something we felt before “life” - the feeling of being wrapped in the holy wholeness of water, in the safety of mother’s womb, unknowingly a part of a much greater entity. Love fills our beings with strange proximity to death, and the encounter with death triggers the thirst for living, the adrenaline that makes us in love with life. In the entanglement of love and death perhaps lies the beauty of our existence.

 

On 18th July was a precious conjunction of planets on the sky, the great race of Venus, Jupiter and the Crescent Moon, with Saturn aligned, an image considered to be very rarely visible. The astrological event when powerful planets meet in a bizarre proximity has been interpreted in the ancient mythology as the creation of the wise sphinx with a face of a virgin and a body of lioness under the stardust of the Waxing Moon, the silent force of the cyclic beginning, the force of creation. Raw power of Jupiter, the planet of expansion, meets Love Goddess and the Crescent Moon in the darkest hours above the water. Moon with its silver shadow has occulted the planet of love.

 

The force moving the planets is the same force that moves the dancers. The same force had entangled the bodies of Tomas and Vanda into a radiating beam of beauty. Regardless of the position of the bodies, the force is eternal and cannot go away; it is in constant flow like an endless wave. The closeness of the bodies is temporary, just as the conjunction of life and death, but the force remains and will act again. The conjunction will appear again after the entire cycle has passed. Moon will cover up Venus next year, while Jupiter will conjunct Saturn every twenty years. One moves so other may move as well, and the periodical exchange of positions is beautiful as each dance.

 

To let something die, you ensure a place for a new thing to be born. People die so we could live. We will die for others. Life does not come from above, it is not a God-sent gift or an aim to achieve or a constant work in progress; it is not a construction or production, it is not investment or a possession; life is a swirl, unleashed energy comprised of love and death, two forces of creation and destruction, up and down of the same wave. It lies on the bottom of the sea, in Shakti’s sound and all songs sung in the bay that boiling day of July. In widow’s tears and screams of the abandoned daughter, in Ali’s blazing light and Sam’s darkest visions, in the first dancing sweat of Tomas and last sweat drops of the fisherman. Each grain of salt is the proof of Creation, the sparkling dust of Heaven.

 

Mia was sitting on the bench by the sea. Behind her the dead fisherman, before her the romantic entanglement. 

 

That’s why dying makes sense – so love can be the measure of all things.

 

 

August, 2015

 

 

Published in Croatian language, ed. ver. Kriticna masa, Croatian literary journal, February 2016.