Evan James Boyle
Evan James Boyle is a twenty year old student from Tranmore who studies English and Sociology in University College Cork. This is the first in a series of short stories entitled 'Life Dreams'.
Hi, my name is Nathan Cleatman and I just died
Hi my name is Nathan Cleatman and I just died. I can’t remember how it happened but now that it has I have to accept it and move on with my life. What better time to reflect on your life than when it is over? I want to tell you about my life, but not in the conventional mundane manner that most of these tales get told in. No, I just want to tell you about a few independent incidents which occurred throughout my life that have got me to the point at which I am now, the end. I will start, boringly, where all these biographies begin, the beginning, but will spare you the banalities of life which take up too many words on pages where more meaningful things could be placed or more beautiful tress survive.
I was up the mountains with my friends on a winter day and it was freezing, the barren mountain side and the harsh weather combining to create a melancholic atmosphere, but my emotions were on the opposite side of the spectrum. It was raining heavily and the icy fog caressed the sides of the valley where we had decided to set up camp for the day. After you die things begin to become hazy; I don’t have much recollection of where we were or why we were there but I feel it is an essential to the story which is my life. So we sat in a valley about three quarters of the way up this gloomy fog riddles rock pile and began to eat our lunches. I think we were only there to eat lunch but I can’t really remember. When you die everything becomes blurred and distorted; I guess you wouldn’t understand. To be frightfully honest there is a host of elements to my brief, unremarkable time on earth which I can’t recall. My hometown for example, or who my parents were, or the majority of my friend’s names. I walked away from the group to the tip of the valley, to look around at the vast infertile landscape which we had exposed ourselves to that day. I reached the highest point or our location and a little beam of glorious November sunlight broke through the mist and shone directly towards me,I turned around to see the ;light slowly edge down through the valley as the cloud cleared ever so slightly. The beam reached my friends who were sitting around in a huddle. I was around a hundred feet from them and could hardly make out what they were saying. The usual chat; unimportant but that is irrelevant when you are in the company of great friends. As I stood there looking down the all erupted in laughter. I could barely hear it with all the wind howling through the aerodynamic wind tunnel which foolishly decided to sit in. It was only a brief moment but as I looked down on them laughing in the hazy sunshine I was happy. None of us had a care in the world and none of us cared that we had nothing to care about. If I could have lived in that moment forever I would have; it was a pure moment of sheer joyousness. This is the first thing I wanted to tell you about. Friendship played a big role in my life and the funniest part of it all is looking back I can hardly recall any of their names. Maybe three at best but there must have been at least twelve of them sitting on the rocks rolling around hysterically in laughter.
There was a party I was at once and it now sticks in my mind as a defining moment in my life. Most people look back through their lives and pick moments of great achievement or accomplishment as defining moments. Some people choose moments of great happiness, like weddings or the birth of their children, others choose moments when they were given inspiring advice. Once you die all these things become trivial and it is the seemingly trivial things which gain importance of gargantuan proportions. The party was in a house I once lived in; it was one of my roommates going away parties before she emigrated to some Shangri-La where there were jobs for everyone, the streets were paved in gold and money grew on trees. I never considered leaving my hometown. It was all I knew and everyone I knew. She however was a different sort and was throwing this party as a last hurrah before she kicked the dust on this chapter in her life and set sail for sunnier shores. Looking back on it now the party seemed to last a lifetime. In reality it must have lasted long after my roommate had left to catch her flight. There may have even been a tinge of regret in her face as we waved her off in her taxi and retired back into the house to continue the debauchery. It was the good vibe tribe and everyone was there for fun. Too much drink was drunk and too much drugs taken. We abused our bodies almost to the point of no return, but maybe this was intentional, we were all so fulfilled that who wanted to return. What was left in reality that we couldn’t enjoy in this environment. I scurried around the house writing on window ledges and fireplaces, taking notes of what had gone on just so we could remember it when we returned to reality. The notes are never there when you wake up, maybe that is a sign that you had a good time, maybe that is a sign that you never scurried around the house looking for places to leave yourself reminders of what went on. Romance and realism distorted and combined into a glorious mix of the real and the imaginary.
At some stage between my marriage and right now I died. I can’t recall how it happened or how old I was or what my final days were like. I spent far too long writing on window sills and ever longer trying to find the window sills I wrote on. The last thing I remember was a funeral. It seems clear that it was my funeral but it didn’t feel like it was my funeral. A little girl was standing in the graveyard in her school uniform and she was crying. It seemed almost like tears of joy, a phenomenon rarely experienced in children. This young girl was at peace with the death of this person, not happy about the death but accepting of it. This is the most striking image left imprinted on my brain as I lie here in my new cast wooden home writing these memoirs. As I mentioned earlier, once death becomes a reality, it is the trivial things which take on a greater importance.
One thing I keep thinking about as I lie here is cheese. I used to eat lots of cheese when I was younger but as I grew older I stopped eating it. In fact I couldn’t even recall the last time I sat down with some brie or some emmenthal and savoured the taste. The fact that I haven’t eaten cheese in so long saddens me and makes my life story that much more confusing. If I loved it when I was younger, and youth is the purest state of existence, then why did I stop?
Hi my name is Nathan Cleatman and I just died. I can’t remember how it happened but now that it has I have to accept it and move on with my life. What better time to reflect on your life than when it is over? I want to tell you about my life, but not in the conventional mundane manner that most of these tales get told in. No, I just want to tell you about a few independent incidents which occurred throughout my life that have got me to the point at which I am now, the end. I will start, boringly, where all these biographies begin, the beginning, but will spare you the banalities of life which take up too many words on pages where more meaningful things could be placed or more beautiful tress survive.
I was up the mountains with my friends on a winter day and it was freezing, the barren mountain side and the harsh weather combining to create a melancholic atmosphere, but my emotions were on the opposite side of the spectrum. It was raining heavily and the icy fog caressed the sides of the valley where we had decided to set up camp for the day. After you die things begin to become hazy; I don’t have much recollection of where we were or why we were there but I feel it is an essential to the story which is my life. So we sat in a valley about three quarters of the way up this gloomy fog riddles rock pile and began to eat our lunches. I think we were only there to eat lunch but I can’t really remember. When you die everything becomes blurred and distorted; I guess you wouldn’t understand. To be frightfully honest there is a host of elements to my brief, unremarkable time on earth which I can’t recall. My hometown for example, or who my parents were, or the majority of my friend’s names. I walked away from the group to the tip of the valley, to look around at the vast infertile landscape which we had exposed ourselves to that day. I reached the highest point or our location and a little beam of glorious November sunlight broke through the mist and shone directly towards me,I turned around to see the ;light slowly edge down through the valley as the cloud cleared ever so slightly. The beam reached my friends who were sitting around in a huddle. I was around a hundred feet from them and could hardly make out what they were saying. The usual chat; unimportant but that is irrelevant when you are in the company of great friends. As I stood there looking down the all erupted in laughter. I could barely hear it with all the wind howling through the aerodynamic wind tunnel which foolishly decided to sit in. It was only a brief moment but as I looked down on them laughing in the hazy sunshine I was happy. None of us had a care in the world and none of us cared that we had nothing to care about. If I could have lived in that moment forever I would have; it was a pure moment of sheer joyousness. This is the first thing I wanted to tell you about. Friendship played a big role in my life and the funniest part of it all is looking back I can hardly recall any of their names. Maybe three at best but there must have been at least twelve of them sitting on the rocks rolling around hysterically in laughter.
There was a party I was at once and it now sticks in my mind as a defining moment in my life. Most people look back through their lives and pick moments of great achievement or accomplishment as defining moments. Some people choose moments of great happiness, like weddings or the birth of their children, others choose moments when they were given inspiring advice. Once you die all these things become trivial and it is the seemingly trivial things which gain importance of gargantuan proportions. The party was in a house I once lived in; it was one of my roommates going away parties before she emigrated to some Shangri-La where there were jobs for everyone, the streets were paved in gold and money grew on trees. I never considered leaving my hometown. It was all I knew and everyone I knew. She however was a different sort and was throwing this party as a last hurrah before she kicked the dust on this chapter in her life and set sail for sunnier shores. Looking back on it now the party seemed to last a lifetime. In reality it must have lasted long after my roommate had left to catch her flight. There may have even been a tinge of regret in her face as we waved her off in her taxi and retired back into the house to continue the debauchery. It was the good vibe tribe and everyone was there for fun. Too much drink was drunk and too much drugs taken. We abused our bodies almost to the point of no return, but maybe this was intentional, we were all so fulfilled that who wanted to return. What was left in reality that we couldn’t enjoy in this environment. I scurried around the house writing on window ledges and fireplaces, taking notes of what had gone on just so we could remember it when we returned to reality. The notes are never there when you wake up, maybe that is a sign that you had a good time, maybe that is a sign that you never scurried around the house looking for places to leave yourself reminders of what went on. Romance and realism distorted and combined into a glorious mix of the real and the imaginary.
At some stage between my marriage and right now I died. I can’t recall how it happened or how old I was or what my final days were like. I spent far too long writing on window sills and ever longer trying to find the window sills I wrote on. The last thing I remember was a funeral. It seems clear that it was my funeral but it didn’t feel like it was my funeral. A little girl was standing in the graveyard in her school uniform and she was crying. It seemed almost like tears of joy, a phenomenon rarely experienced in children. This young girl was at peace with the death of this person, not happy about the death but accepting of it. This is the most striking image left imprinted on my brain as I lie here in my new cast wooden home writing these memoirs. As I mentioned earlier, once death becomes a reality, it is the trivial things which take on a greater importance.
One thing I keep thinking about as I lie here is cheese. I used to eat lots of cheese when I was younger but as I grew older I stopped eating it. In fact I couldn’t even recall the last time I sat down with some brie or some emmenthal and savoured the taste. The fact that I haven’t eaten cheese in so long saddens me and makes my life story that much more confusing. If I loved it when I was younger, and youth is the purest state of existence, then why did I stop?