Story Stopper

Part IV: Lost but not forgotten

It's always in times when I am most surrounded by people that I get lost in the fray between the two worlds. To people around me, I look as if I'm simply lost in deep thought but my Soul actually becomes disembodied from its host and floats in the great vacuum between the here and the beyond. I feel my great wings stretch the crevace and glide while others can only fall.

Deviel exists here since she chooses not to take corporeal form and often times I have met her here in between the death of wives and children. I meet her here after my body's death and my waiting for a new form to inhabit.

Once she asked me why I didn't just stay there.

"You are immortal, my Grim," she said, "what's the point of experimenting with humanity? It's almost cruel and masochistic to put yourself through that and then tell others that there's a point to letting go."

"You of all creatures under god should understand my choice, oh Promethius of the people: one cannot understand the value of life and what they have to surrender without first becoming a part of what they are."

"You are wise to think so, my eternal," she said, "but you forget that a reapers job is not to die but to live forever in the pursuit of ferrying people to the beyond. How does it make any difference in your thought pattern if you know that you will never go through the specific process in which your essential function is involved?"

In this moment, I happened to be out at a late night blues bar and I ended our conversation with a snap back to reality. She had a point and it drove me crazy to think about it. Was there really no point to corporeal life as a reaper? Was my existence simply to preform my function and not to diversify?

Human life was so filled with meaning and future but time was boring when it was no longer linear. Existence meant days with no sunset. Deviel made her peace with her non-linnear time because she devoted herself to function. Were it not for her messianic qualities, it was a miracle god did not make her the grim.

I believe that it was in the year 1 AD, however, that I understood how this cycle of death and living amongst human beings was critical to my being the grim. I never realized in 10,000 years that god put so much emphasis on the meaning of being human until the Christ child came along. In the days before him, heaven and earth were separate entities. God was loving but he was to be feared first and foremost. What was interesting to me, also, and what I had not realized in my inception was that none of my protégé were able to recorporealize as I could until 1 AD.

As they were, those reapers I had assigned the task were lost and forgotten to the world but my accomplishments in all my incarnations as a human were always there and remembered. A higher angel once told me how blessed I was for being given that gift. Of course, there were exceptions: I could not talk about the beyond to human beings, but I was able to accomplish so much from all the life I lead in multiple forms.

In this way, Deviel was wrong. I may have been lost as a reaper, never to put meaning towards any one of my many human lives but each one of my existences meant something for a future of humanity that I helped to contribute towards. In this way, I became a better Grim and told her of my learning as we both grew together.