The Soul Shatters

The soul shatters upon death. Sentience fractures into a million variables that swirl chaotically into piercing eyes that melt into the color sadness, spinning into galaxies that shrink to the size of ants and you twirl in a blender of being for eternities until finally, at long last, something sticks. Perhaps it may be as simple as a strand of hair, nonetheless all possibility spins around it, flashing contradictions of rainbow transparencies, empty solids and polka dotted space, continuing until a second hair joins the first, clutching to the nothingness and refusing to move. Soon thousands of hairs arrive and synchronize above a scalp unto a face, torso, limbs… materializing ever faster… and at once you are born. And just as the memory of your trial and error experimentation and prior life evaporate, you embrace the arms of a stranger, gazing into her eyes, hung between this world and the next… sobbing in a fit of omniscience, in awe of your hard earned shape. Jacob Reinhardt 10/15/2013