Lost

I took a bus to run away from myself. I carried nothing with me lest my travel paraphernalia remind of myself. I wanted to get lost in an outlandish faraway place so I took a bus to a bizarre place the bus operator referred to as Idontknowwhere. Five days I was on that bus, five nights I sat awake in my seat and stared at the blackness of the night. Five days of staring at the fleeting darkness left me in a state of pseudo blindness that even when the sun finally came up in the morning, all I saw was darkness. I lost some of my five senses and I became apathetic to beauty and sound. The mornings that had so often in the past been my best part of the day were now just a dull passing of time’s slow dragging motion.

When the bus finally reached that place called Idontknowwhere, it was ten days later. I was only conscious of five. The rest of the five days must have been spent in euphoria for I journeyed far away in lands yet undiscovered by neo-man. In my odysseys, I communed with humanoid forms who had eyes on each side of their heads. They had the most beautiful inhabitance anyone could imagine. More magnificent that the exotic places Jules Vern saw in his 80 days around the world. I spent what seemed like eons learning from my hosts, sharing experiences and watching life grow out of thin air and spread out in white, agile wisps of beautiful thermal blossoms. In my mind, I conceived them as spirits…pristine spirits, untainted with the maze of worldly inequity. I was moved to believe that one is born with a spirit but as life wanes on, sin consumes the once pristine spirit getting it entangled in the life long quest to escape the intricate maze of sin and later when one dies, the spirit is so tanned with sin it ceases to be a spirit but rather becomes known as a ghost. A ghost is that lesser spectacle of a spirit that has fallen short of righteousness and is thus liable to condemnation, judgment and ultimately redemption.

So I woke up five days later still in this bus. The acrid stench of cheap cigarette smoke saturated the confined spaces of the bus’ closed windows. Just as my eyes where getting acclimatized with the environment, I heard a voice speak. It was the voice of a young girl about 5 years old. So I turned around to follow the source of the voice and all my senses that seemed to come back to me came face to face with a marvel. The 5 year old’s voice came from one of the humanoid forms in had communed with in euphoria. I felt as though my spirit was being lifted right out of my body. Am I dying? I asked myself before I became aware of the trembling in the bus. The trembling grew greater in magnitude and I suddenly couldn’t feel my legs. I could see trees being shaken out of their deep roots through the dust-daubed windows of the bus. My fear manifested itself through a sudden perspiration and the taste of bile on my tongue. Desperation set in as I couldn’t move myself at all, death prowled all over my peripherals. I cried to the eccentric life form to save me and she just watched me as though my plight amused her. From the corner of my eye, I saw a fire growing at the back of the bus, I could now feel the back of my head being roasted. I couldn’t breathe no more. Oblivious to the passage of time or any pain, my hair caught fire and I saw the hot blue flames engulf me and continue to swallow the entire bus. The last sound I heard was a huge blast. A huge, obscene blast that sounded as though the entire world was being blown apart by a trillion megatons of the world’s vilest hydrogen bomb.

I found myself standing in space, perched on a static cloud. I looked at my hands and I was spooked for I had no hands yet I could move them. I moved my right hand to my left shoulder and I felt myself. My relief was only momentary for even though I could feel myself, I couldn’t see myself. My avid brain quickly processed the matter and reiterated to me that I was blind. So I closed my eyes and I could see a thousand hills bursting with picturesque waterfalls and rainbows that seemed to run from one edge of the world to the crest of the heavens. Am not blind, I told myself as I opened my eyes. I could now see the wind and molecules of air floating about the space in front of me in half hazard motions. I was standing on a cloud half way between the moon and the earth but I could hear voices from three worlds away. What have I become? , I asked myself. I searched hard and deep to find myself but I couldn’t. I was lost, lost to myself, lost to the world. I had become something I couldn’t see, something I couldn’t find, something is couldn’t explain. I was lost. I wasn’t a ghost.