Atlantic / Doldrums Alone

He told her
“When my pencil breaks, well, that’s the end of my story.”

She said
“That’s such an awful shame.”

But he just laughed and shook his head.
“See, you’re swimming in a lake of fire, where everything either burns or doesn’t.
But I’m soaring through the infinite,
Where the end of one great thing is just the start of another.”

She looked at him as he continued.

“And how much more room would we have to be Alive if we stopped erecting gaudy, virgin effigies as clever symbols of our well-blossomed empires. If presidents contained their grandeur and Great White Fleets; if we cut the thrill of our political vampires.”

And at that very moment, a great plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, summoning the transcontinental media from their shallow graves.

With them came fleets of sleepwalkers and street gangs, mourning the death of flesh and metal. And her fingers flew through every textbook, conjuring their wisdoms and figures.

“You can’t measure Alive,”
She said.

“How do you measure Alive?”
She meant.

Businessmen paced through St. Patrick’s cathedral, making unholy spectacles out of reciting facts and records into tiny headsets, while an endlessly flickering sadness swept through families like a ruthless winter storm.

He assured her.
“Yes, you can.”

And the warmth of the families’ affections extended to whichever Heaven they bid it go, guided by the hand of the same Great Sundering that had dragged the plane into the water; the same Sundering that had created the metal from which it was made, and the water into which it fell.

“This world is the Doldrums alone,”
He explained
“A single page filled with empty writing. But simply by believing in anything we can’t see, we turn the page and unburden ourselves from our earthly weirs.”

And colossal machines whirred above the surface, salvaging the wreckage they could not see, guided by coordinates and engineered faith.

“And in that astral overlap we can measure Alive. Not by the breaths we have taken, but by those we believe in taking somewhere new and beautiful.”

And those souls continued crashing through the universe, trading death for life in that eternal cycle. And the sadness of the families alleviated to the absolution of unchained thought. And the sleepwalkers opened their eyes to the morning light as the street gangs continued to wage wars on a fractured realm.

“Alive,”
He told her
“Is measured not in time or body, but in love.”