matchbook

regor does not believe in an afterlife, though he has more proof than most that one exists. When he was sixteen, his heart stopped for two-and-three-quarters of a minute during a wrestling match. He’d starved and deprived his body of water for a week before, spitting in a cup during classes to fully desertify his organs. All this in holy service of making the weight his coach had prescribed his pupal and still-pubescing body. The strain of the match was too much. He collapsed during the transition between rounds, rising up for a moment from the sweat-stained mat with his hands on his hips before crashing back to the floor. Sometime during the technical death, he witnessed what he could only call heaven. Not so much a place, but a ceaseless orgy of possibility, a billion sweating, undulating almost-bodies that writhed and danced in the ecstatic aether, one with another, exchanging essences like midnight ravers swap sweat. It would, he was certain, feel good to decohere back into a possibility, unmoored from the kinetic insistence of life. Yet, for reasons he could not articulate but had something to do with the fact that, at sixteen, he was more than a little sick of the word “potential,” he followed a light, and at its eventual end opened his eyes unto the terrified, suddenly twenty-years-older face of his father. The man squeezed his hand like one of them was about to fall off the side of a cruise ship. He blinked back to life and was surprised, in the month that followed, how effortlessly things resumed. Many of Gregor's other miracles remain unknown to him, such is the nature of close calls. Once, he almost met a soul-mate on a plane to Korea, but the stranger missed his connecting flight. Gregor got to spread his legs out into the empty middle seat and actually get some comfortable sleep on a plane for once. He fell into dreams thinking himself the luckiest man alive.