The Day of the Dead

At the top of one of the several hundred blue mountains that rose from the ground in that distant planet, under a night of stars and dreams, above a sleeping city, a conversation began to take place.

“Do you know what day it is?” A man of silver skin and shining eyes asked without turning.

“No…” A young mind answered, one which had been born into an eternal body, ignorant of the millennia that preceded him, without thinking much on the questions he was hearing.

“Today is the day we remember the dead.” The voice of the prehistoric man explained, his voice resonating in the valleys between the mountains.

“What’s that?” The gaze of the young mind turned to the man standing with him, trying to remember an instance in his life in which the word was used.

“It’s the day we remember the people who were here before us. You know… we weren’t always made of silver, we haven’t always lived here, in the center of the galaxy. Everything you see here hasn’t always been… and some of us that were, are not anymore.” The man rose from the ground and pointed towards a barely visible dot in the zenith. Amongst the millions of interstellar fireflies, an almost imperceptible light stood out in his eyes. A yellow light, a distant light, a light so ethereal it was almost impossible to remember the warmth that emanated from within it. “Up there… that’s where things die, that’s where we must look upon, that’s where we come from and where many stayed behind.”

“Is it Earth?” The young mind watched the almost invisble light of the star where his ancestors had sprouted from, where the silver man, who stood next to him, had spent his first years, or so they said. “Do you remember something?” He dared to ask.

“I remember…” He said without lowering his hand, staring at the star above his shining finger. “I remember the crickets singing every night. I remember the dances we would go to, everyone was there, we laughed and we remembered things from another past. I remember her, her spectacular smile, her pleasent laugh, her deep eyes and her good soul. I remember the lush tree under which we sat to talk for hours.”

“What’s a tree?”

And even though the man had heard the question, he ignored it. “I don’t remember the things we said anymore, I remember her face, but not her voice. I remember her hair, but not her body.” For an instant the man wanted to smash his eternal body, for a moment he wanted to rip his face off and cry the tears accumulated across thousands of years. But crying was no longer possible.

“Why do we remember them?”

“Oblivion. Oblivion is the place where things that are forgotten go. Oblivion exists beyond the last star of our galaxy, it exists beyond even the borders of our universe. We can keep defying it, we can keep believing we’ll be alive even after everything else has disappeared. We can pretend we are gods and that nothing will ever end us, but end comes for us all. At the end of all things oblivion will be waiting for us in the darkness.”

The man of silver lowered his hand, and again the yellow light of that ancient sun drowned into the sea of stars. He sat back down and after a pause he said: “We remember them to give them back their lives… we remember so they can walk with us in our journey, we remember so they’ll live forever with us and so we can postpone the oblivion that will one day consume us… for another moment with them… for another moment of life.”