Card-Carrying Corpse

"The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."
-T.S. Eliot

I am not a zombie. Ha, I wish. No, my status as a dead guy is much less interesting. Actually, I don’t even know what kind of dead I qualify as. I’m not the uber awesome rotting carcass that eats the flesh of the living. I’m not even the moderately neat “walk through walls ghost” kind of dead. I’m just a guy who got caught up and cut up in the sharp knives of the world and didn’t make it out alive. My feelings were filleted and all emotions were excised. I’m trapped in some kind of limbo, a sort of purgatory on Earth. By all outside appearances, I seem alive, if not a bit pallid. And that’s what’s so frustrating about this whole situation. No one knows that my heart doesn’t beat for them or anyone else and I certainly can’t even tell anyone. They’ll think I’m crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m just a corpse. And so I have to go on pretending that I’m fine, that I’m alive and somewhat well while I stumble through my death trying to make sense of it all.

I’ve always heard that death was a release, that death was freedom. That’s crap. If anything, once I died, I was disconnected from all that I knew and held dear and because of that, I was able to look outside of myself and see how boxed in I always was, still am. I guess you could call it a temporary out of body experience, a short shift in my point-of-view. I saw everything from a new perspective but instead of opening up my perceptions, it only closed them in further. I feel more trapped than ever. Death is not the end of pain. Death only exacerbates the emptiness. Sorry to burst your bubble. Not only do I have to go on like a living person but I have to figure out why I’m here now. What purpose do I serve at this point? How do you connect with a cadaver? How do I help people when I’m far from saving myself? Am I forced to stick around until I make some sense of the life I used to have, until I can figure out why and how I made such a mess of things when I was still breathing? Is that the purpose? Is that why I haven’t moved on?

What’s going to happen once I do figure things out, if I ever do? Will I be reinstated into life or will I finally pass over? I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. I was shoved into this realm of restlessness without an instruction manual, left to feel my way through the doldrums of death, all alone and just as messed up as ever. Wouldn’t you think death would offer at least a few perks? Maybe to reduce my craziness or at least provide some sort of insight to work with, anything but leaving me stranded with the same damaged brain and body that got me into this mess in the first place. Unfortunately I wasn’t offered any kind of benefits package. I’m going to have to work my way from the bottom up, to discover each revelation on my own, to work for my salvation. Is it even possible? What is there to learn? What am I supposed to know that’s not only keeping me here but will help me on the other side? What does it even matter anymore? I’m dead. I’m disconnected, I’m exiled from everything just like I always was so I don’t understand what the point of any of this is. Life made no sense when I was alive and there were days when I just wanted to die to escape the nonsensical role I was given. Well, I got my wish but nothing has changed, nothing has gotten any better.

The only explanation I can think of is that we either all have a purpose or we all need to figure something out until we can pass over. Once we do, we can move on. These lessons are usually reserved for life but I guess sometimes something gets messed up. Wires are crossed. Numbers get switched. Life turns into an uncontrollable mess and death can come unexpectedly before those lessons are learned. And I guess that’s what happened in my case and so here I am, a consequence of the universe’s inability to keep up with the lives and destinies of around six billion people. I mean, really, is it that hard to do? Someone’s gonna get fired for this.

You know, when I went through my teenage years, I felt like my ability to analyze myself and others grew along with my age and my waistline. Ever since I was able to tap into myself in a deep way, I’ve been trying to figure out who I was and why I was. When I began writing, it helped that process, allowed me to not only think about my feelings, but organize them, lay them out in a way that was not only aesthetically pleasing but created a reference point for future pondering. Yet, I felt I never made much progress. Sure, I came close to figuring out why I became overweight, why I never had any real friends, why I always felt insignificant but nothing ever changed. As much as I wrote and as much as I learned about myself, nothing ever stuck. Those epiphanies lasted as long as the length of a page and never extended beyond that. As I was writing, I was learning but as soon as I was done, I went back to the way I was. It seemed as though I never absorbed what I was trying to convey, like there was some kind of revelation repellent coating my heart and mind. Sure, I was able to shoot it out into the world but couldn’t get it to penetrate me. Needless to say, these life lessons have not carried over into my death. I almost feel like I’m starting over. Despite my rotting frame, everything else feels fresh and new, each journey into myself is as if I’ve never been there before, as if I’m meeting a stranger within myself. This is why I have been reading over past pieces of writing and posting them here. I’m trying to reconnect with the lessons I've "learned" while writing them, hoping that if I read them over, if I go back to them, that they will teach me something and that it will finally stick this time, that I’ll gain something and maybe even touch upon that lesson that I was always supposed to learn while alive, so that I may move on to a proper death. The sad part is, it could take years. It took me years of writing to go from suicidally insane to just majorly effed up. What progress. So, obviously this won't be an overnight process. You can't rush the undead.

And so here I am, dead and still interacting with people and pretending to care about old friends, still eating and defecating and sleeping and hurting and doing all the normal things living people do, wearing a mask of humanity and worst of all, still looking for a job. The dead have to eat, too. But, shouldn't death be a full time job? An hours journey into one's self is just as grueling as a full day of work. Especially when the boss is annoying as I am.

I just think being a zombie would be so much easier. They don't have to worry about rehabilitating their souls, rewinding past ruminations or reversing rigor mortis. They are mindless and therefore blissfully apathetic. And they get to eat unashamedly. It's the perfect kind of undeath.