First Bardo

He remembered…something, a pain in his chest, a loud noise, being afraid, a man pointing a gun at him, a long walk with his wife after dinner on a quiet summer evening, and then, all gone.

He thought it would be more difficult, but really it felt like jerking out of sleep: the body begins to relax (not your body, there is no you to notice) and then the roar of something from outside the darkness behind your eyelids and suddenly your body convulses and you are awake, laying there with your eyes open in the dark and your heart beating rapidly in your chest. This was like that.

But instead of darkness he found himself in luminous emptiness that rang like a bell and thought, well that’s that, then. There was a moment, brief, like a half-remembered melody, a scent of something on the air (parallel melding of the serrated edge of memory and sweetness: cinnamon, vanilla, his mother’s hair, candle wax) that made him ache and long to ache yet longer, and then the roar came again, and he knew that something had been missed, an opportunity, gone.