An Excerpt from my Upcoming Book

This woman just looks like a young Esther, I tell myself. It’s impossible for this woman to actually be her. Then she is running toward me, and we are hugging and I wonder that my arms don’t just go right through her since she must be a ghost. But she is quite solid, and in excellent physical shape, better than I am myself if I am honest. Her arms feel like she’s been lifting weights for the past nine months of her absence. Of course that’s ridiculous; she’s been dead, not off on a trip to a health spa.

She is definitely in her prime now; she receives three double takes from men passing by, but flicks off their attentions like so many flies, like the diva she’s always been, like the diva she is.

“Esther,” my eyes are tearing now from the shock, and the pure joy of seeing her again, “Is it really you?”

“Of course, Dearest Friend, I would think that’s fairly obvious.”

And in that instant I am jostled forever out of my old habits of looking at her, everything. I realize that how I interact with everyone, not simply her has been in error, how stilted it’s been and misaligned – all along – like hitting a repeat button on a skipped, scratched part of an old record album that keeps going back to the same spot, the same scratch again and again because the scratch has been ingrained that way into the record and there’s no stopping it. It would take a bit of rattling to shift it out of there – the scratch has worn deep because of repeat after repeat after repeat. I’ve kept perceiving, kept interacting, kept refusing to see the truth, kept acting out the same patterns of misperception over and over again; it makes me want to cry.

But now her physical presence, alive and vital, has jolted me out of that earlier dream that was a nightmare, and I am buying into the business of immortality because it is right there in front of me.

I want her to feed it to me. I’ve been parched and hungry for it out here in this desert, and now she has finally arrived to help me see it, though space that isn’t there, through time that doesn’t exist, right there in front of me now, holding me together with the truth of who she is, evidence beyond evidence that she is still here.