My Own Heaven

For all the world’s worth I swear I died that night. I swear I died and I did.

Snow was coming down thick and fast, turning into water as soon as it touched anything but air. My breath, whiskey flavoured and sharp, clouded my vision with white fog. To be honest I can’t say exactly what happened. I left the bar, alone, not drunk, just happy, and everything was fine. Started walking across the fields towards home. They must have jumped me, but all I can remember is the blood and the pain, one of them kicking me in the ribs in earnest, shouting his mouth off like he was fucking something. Blood and pain and swirling snow. Flying white crystals settling on my eyelashes and freezing there. They stole everything I had and everything I was wearing except my jeans.

After they’d left I lay in the snow on my back, too weak and too cold to move, I knew I was bleeding badly from somewhere. To be honest the thought of getting up just seemed like too much effort. After all who had I wronged for such swift punishment? Beaten to within an inch of my life and left in the snow for hypothermia to set in, all for a laugh, a coat and twenty quid. My mouth was filling up with blood.

Staring up at the snow covered roof of the world, too cold to shiver, I saw something. A bird, a white ghost with a wing span of centuries, circling, circling. My tired eyes follow it’s progress, regular, sleep inducing. I feel my breathing slow, the lack of energy as my heart pulses faintly beneath my bruised and beaten ribs. My eyes are sinking slowly closed, frozen eyelashes obscuring the view.

Warmth. Sudden and beautiful, something like the sun coming out on a winters day. It comes blossoming up through my spine, my chest, my abdomen, spreading through me. Breathing seems easier. The air around me is warm, there is silk under my questing fingers. I open my eyes. Whiteness all around and this figure leaning over me with its hand on my chest. The figure is glowing with white light, terrible and beautiful all at once. Long hair like white lava spills onto my chest. There is no pain, but I can’t move. I want to wrap myself up in this being and sleep forever. Two shining points of light look out at me from the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen and whatever it is curls up to me like a lover, lying along my body, sharing it’s warmth.

It can’t last and the creatures face is distraught as I feel myself being pulled back to a world of pain. I wake in the ambulance, sirens going, a medic shouting, and I know there’s this smile on my face because I can still see that beautiful creature in my far off vision. I know already that I’ll spend the rest of my life looking for that face and that feeling. But no, I won’t find it. I won’t find it until that summers day twenty years from now.