Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

deep bass mumble, one is a screeching shrew, and a third does nothing but curse and swear at the other two. Sometimes they all merge into a bug-eyed, strangling gargle. It doesn’t stop until daylight comes.
    For the first time I see how I’ve spent my entire life on a pendulum, swinging back and forth between the two faces of God—the face that hides in shadow and the face that shines forth from the light. The cigarettes, the yoga, the sleeping pills, the meditation, the trashy horror movies, the music of Bach, the losing of myself in sex, the Catholicism, the self-destructive urge, and the abandonment of myself to the ecstasy of love. I saw the face of light as I struggled to understand life through the heart of the Rose.
    What I crave more than anything today is to sit at an outdoor café on a cool autumn day. I just want to feel that end-of-the-year breeze as I sip a cup of green tea and take my time with a piece of pumpkin pie. I would slump in my chair and allow my mind to roam wherever it chose. Nothing else in the world epitomizes absolute freedom to me more than that thought. I could be alone or with a friend I know so well that we wouldn’t have to speak. Sometimes I wake up in the morning thinking about pumpkin pie.
    I’m convinced that people see the ghosts of themselves all the time, but most just choose to block them out. The words don’t even make sense to me, and I know it’s true. When I was seven years old I saw the ghost of myself at the age of eighteen. Ever since that day I’ve kicked myself for not asking questions. I’ve no idea what my eighteen-year-old self could have told me at that point—perhaps nothing at all. Still, I can’t help but think of it as a lost opportunity. Somehow there was a slight fluctuation in the current, and two of me bled through the fabric at once.
    Trying to figure out the meaning behind such events can drive you mad, because there is no answer. Perhaps it was some sort of hiccup. Then again, perhaps I was making some Herculean effort to reach out to myself, and that was all I could manage.
    I used to wonder if some other me had died on Death Row, causing all of my selves to snap back like a broken rubber band and haunt each other. Now I doubt it, even though no other answer is any more likely. It just doesn’t feel right.
    These things are always strongest in December, when the year is as thin and transparent as plastic wrap. Something in the center of my chest rejoices that this is my birth month—it swoons like a religious zealot with a mouthful of Hallelujahs.
    D ECEMBER 11
    I have never seen the sun on my birthday. It simply does not shine. This one single day is immortal, eternally waiting for me to return to it once every year. It is a sentient gray room that sits outside the world’s rotational authority. This is the day of the winter eclipse, and the graveyard of my alienation. Time is marked with an hourglass filled with snow instead of sand.
    This day is one of the closest things to ritual or tradition that my family ever embraced. It’s the quietest day of the year—no birds sing, no cars backfire, and there is no laughter. It enwraps me in a soft and soothing cocoon, and it holds me like a secret. Even the pictures on the walls silently sing its grace. If there was ever only one day on Marlou Island, then this would be that day.
    D ECEMBER 25
    Christmas Day itself is always bittersweet, because it’s the last day of that beautiful magick that’s been building up like a tidal wave for the past month. In just a week it will be hard to even remember what it’s like. I’ll be brokenhearted at the thought of it being gone again for an entire year.
    At home I always preferred Christmas Eve to Christmas. All the family would come over for the party. There would be sandwiches, homemade cookies and candy, chips and dip, and everyone would be in a great mood. After they left, my sister and I would be allowed to open up all of our presents at the stroke of midnight, unless I was at St. Michael’s for the Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. If I was, then we opened them the second I got home. The house was always so warm. No one was ever in a bad mood, because we were experiencing the magick that had been accumulating for months. It sparkled in my mother’s eyes.
    It’s been about fourteen years since I’ve really celebrated Christmas, or even had a decent meal on this day. The feeling the day carries manages to seep in through these concrete walls,