The Canterbury Deaths

When I die, it'll be with a perky goth girl who's been waiting for me her entire life. She'll be gentle, and whimsical, and philosophical about easing me into a void where even the damned dream. They must dream or else they'll escape.

You read too much Neil Gaiman. When I die, it'll be an androgynous, tall figure in a black robe. It will carry a sickle. It will think of me as little more than grain to be reaped, for what else is earth but a field upon which death grows harvests?

You don't know that. When I die, it'll be a Backspace key. It'll delete the end of my life, then the midlife crisis, then the mistakes in my thirties, my time interning in Silicon Valley, then the mistake of going to college, then my all my awful teenage romances, and I'll de-adolesce into a string of nonsense sentences about childhood, until the only remark that's left is, "Unremarkably, Mario Marquez Jianming was born."

I'll wrestle a serpent down the trunk of the first tree that ever bloomed, only resting when it submits to my will.

When I die, I'll get into an elevator where all the floors are 13. It's where they keep the places every other building is afraid to go. Sometimes I visit skyscrapers that have a 13 just to see what death is like. It feels a lot like a tense ball in your gut and minimum wage insurance auto-dialing banks.

Death isn't a thing. There's a sweet man with skin like a cardboard tube and hair the color of toilet paper, and he's a shameless flirt, and everybody wants his attention and his gaze and a dance and then another dance and then another of something else. Some people are stillborn and never meet him, and someone people stumble on the first step of the papery waltz. He's Life, and he's real, but death is just when he stops paying attention to you. It's a petty absence.

I imagine it'll be midway through the journey of our life, and akin to finding ourselves in a sloping and darkened forest, surrounded by wolves and lions that stir in us such feelings that we question if we are body or shade. That's the death of it – not the afterward. I need to flesh out the afterward.