Kiss of Death

I guessed it was dark and lonely in the coffin.  I forced my eyes closed in the dark.  It felt so empty and it was cold.  The blanket covered me from feet to chin and let the moving air touch my nose.  I could see myself collapse right in front of my face.  There was nobody around.  I had to pull my soulless body up.  I was dead in a sudden.  How and why I could not know.  I didn’t remember how I wrapped my body in white clothe like how normal dead body was done somewhere.  I pulled my body in my car and drove to the funeral place myself.

I didn’t know where it was exactly but it was surely somewhere in the heart of Bangkok.  It seemed to be a place near Thailand Bible Society but I didn’t have a clue why I went there.  The place was so crowded.  It was neither a Buddhist temple nor a church.  It was just a place for funeral.  I stepped out from my car and walked to the place where they accepted dead bodies.  The carts where dead bodies lied down were full.  They looked at me and told me to wait for a while.  They were busy.  I throttled around to see what they did over there.  Many bodies were queuing for funeral.  I didn’t see any presence of a monk or a pastor.  There were just mere busy people trying to get the funeral done.  It seemed a while before they were available to accept my body.

I dragged my body out from my car and they gave me a small gold-painted coffin.  The coffin was as small as my body.  The lid was more like a Egyptian mummy coffin’s.  I held my body to the coffin and placed the gold-painted lid to cover.  I could smell my body.  I was a few days since I died.  The body was getting rotten.  There was definitely no one at all but me and my dead body.  I looked at a group of people.  They were relatives of a dead girl being held for funeral.  I offered them to pay for tiffins for several days.  A caretaker threw something like fireworks in my coffin.  They wanted to cremate me now.  “No, this is not the time.” I said.  “No one in my family knew that I was dead.  This has been a few days already but we have to wait for one more day.”  They listened to me at least.  But the funeral never happened.

The alarm clock woke me up.  It was early in the morning that I had to go to work.  I hardly opened my eyes.  I wanted to know what would happen next.  I would not have an opportunity to know.  I believed it was absolutely by God’s will.  It must have been something on my mind that I had to struggle to survive taking care of myself even when I was dead and helpless.

I needed to move on.