My eyes burned, felt singed. Blinded. The metallic taste of stale seawater swirling with a dull yet sharp twang on my tongue brought me back. Landing hard, crashing on the swabbed deck like a drenched leather sack of humid, rotting shark and fish chum, I woke up face down, soaked to the bone and drenched in salty sweat and iron blood. Breathing heavily, desperately, but no oxygen came. Was I suffocating, drowning? I felt something different coming hard and fast. An intense sense of another metaphysical awakening from within was coming. Now.
Something familiar, additional archaic whispers rapidly writhing amongst a rushed maelstrom. A quick rush arrived with a lucky strike of the matchstick. Suddenly my body burst into white lightning, burnt orange, then crimson flames. This time no pain, just a calming, growing warmth spreading through me. As I was fully consumed by fire, now a glowing invisible force, I felt a sense of release as my ashes fell scattered, blowing away and mixing with the winding, gentle ocean’s undertow. Now deeper than the Mariana Trench. Light lost reluctantly to the deep.
The tightly organized pressure that was always holding my organs and tissues together had given way. I was now free from all of the earthly delights that seduced us all. Earthly, an odd adjective for technology that betrayed us leaving us lost and forgetful. Not all of us were led astray by the sirens’ songs. I kept my head down, ears covered, and divinely protected. I was a rare bird, er fish. One of only a handful remaining with pulsing neurons capable of critical thinking. I passed the tests. So many tests. God’s boot camp was now over, but who or what am I now?
Then I heard it. A fragment of a never ending echo, a wavelength from far across streams of southern consciousness came as four items hovering just slightly above the weathered surface of a hexagonal game table. A fork, spoon, glass, and a single toothpick. What’s up Doc? God I loved my family’s clever bread crumbs. Never stale. This puzzle my sisters and I knew since our earliest years of an innocent childhood. I had no physical form so my soul’s reaching grasp passed through these objects resembling puzzle pieces of Grandad’s center of gravity trick.