Bear with me now. This is going to be a little more of a difficult look than normal because the WOTD is a verb, and one that I don’t often use as a sense of anything larger but largely as a bridge. So, let’s see what happens over the next ten minutes.
Word of the Day: Pertain
I am a coward. I know it. I am learning to accept it. I have no choice.
People like to talk about fault.; about how it is not because of themselves that they are in the condition they are in. If I look back at my life I can find a number of entry points for fault. Take my Grandmother, for example. She was a wonderful woman at times. She went to church, she fed and clothed me, she treated me like I was her own son, and she still died screaming. I remember it well. I Stood outside the room as the doctors worked on her, begging to be let in–to see her that one last time. I often hear her screams in the night, the way she sounded was worse than terrified. She kept telling them that she didn’t want to die, that she knew what was out there and she didn’t want to go, didn’t want to get any closer. She told them to pull her back and they didn’t.
That was the first time I knew that I couldn’t die. No, not that I was unable, but that I was unwilling. I tried to rationalize that fear so many different ways. I stayed up shivering through the nights haunted by the sounds of her dying and asked myself what could be so terrible out there in the beyond that she fought t stay away from. She was old. her body hurt everyday. Yet she refused to go until death snatched her from the living.
That is why I started to research. That is why I looked into all of the science behind life and death seeking some form of answer. When I found none in the pages of the scientists who’ve been searching for these answers for a thousand years, I turned to the people who’ve been looking far longer. I found the answers in religion. Not the new stuff that we allow to define our understanding of time. No, I mean before the concepts of AD existed, in the when before.
Did you know that Jesus was far from the first to return from beyond? The Catonese spoke of Geung-si long before that middle eastern man was murdered to great fanfare. I learned of them and then I learned of others like them whose Qi allowed them not to return from the land of the dead but avoid it entirely. However, it came with a bargain. It came with a very stiff bargain.
So, you see, I am a coward. I did not want to ever die, so I sought out the means of everlife. I sought out that bargain, that belonging that made me what I am. Now I mean to pass on that cost to you.