The White Silence
Seven minutes lingered, an interim of residue,
a trembling partition between continuance and conclusion.
The body rehearsed survival, a theatre of reflex and delay.
Then the stage went silent,
a horizon drawn flat, an axis without a pulse,
and the world sank into a white silence.
Afterward, an emergence.
Not awakening, but reclassification.
not darkness, but a chamber of neutrality,
where remnants of existence drifted in an ordered abyss.
No faces, only the abstraction of record:
gestures catalogued, errors weighed beside their opposites,
the arithmetic of a lifetime balanced without judgment.
No weeping, no pleading, just the hollow patience of cattle.
An attendant present neither stern nor merciful, only procedural,
spoke as if reading an inventory.
Then a designation was issued.
At first numerical, then nominal.
Identification persisted, even as the self no longer did.
The chamber resembled judgment,
yet nothing of judgment occurred.
Records lay in sequence: notations, erasures, marginalia.
"An account, not a verdict." The clerk read,
Errors and kindnesses balanced in two columns.
The result: Passable.
A new dossier appeared.
Families arranged in archival order,
faces attached for reference.
Instruction: Choose.
The choice was not preference, but compliance
the necessity of continuation.
From abstraction into assignment,
from absence into recurrence.
Thus the cycle proceeds:
not reward, not punishment, but iteration.
Existence drafted again,
not as consequence but as mechanism.
The soul does not inherit.
The soul does not stumble.
The soul is allocated, reinserted,
until the ledger of moral requires no more.
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