Hide Me in Sheol by Matthew Erman (top 20 books to read txt) 📕

the feelings that I felt to the front of my chest, the longing and realisation that it will be a very long time before I ever see her again, the girl I loved. I had missed her so much then, standing in the darkness that was the afterlife. I wondered if this was all an even bigger dream, a dream that was all encompassing. I wished to open my eyes and see her laying next to me; to roll over and see her face clearly, then sigh relief - close my eyes again and go back to sleep. In my time thinking of her, it wasn't the case, it never is.

*

I had moved to Tokyo with Allison, to be with her as she worked on a new movie. It was her biggest break in ten years, working as a director of photography. It was great seeing her abilities and passions being explored fully and emotionally. She had been hired to work on a big budget film adaptation of a popular novel. I was a writer and I'd went with her to keep her company as she worked on the shoot. She asked me to write a screenplay for her, she wanted t direct after she was finished working as a director of photography and kept saying it would be the 'perfect first project for us.' I was actually a published writer, not a very famous one, but I sold modestly enough to stay on contract with my publisher and made a living through up-front payments for publishing rights. I was no Faulkner, but I managed and that is what made me mostly happy. I received mixed reviews; I looked forward to the good ones, but it was the bad ones that kept me going.
Allison and I had been there for a month, the shoot was four months and being a big budget there was many days of waiting for her. In-between shots, and although she enjoyed what she was doing. I rarely saw her, gone most of the day. It would be only the late hours of the night or early morning when she would be with me, occasionally a day off which we would spend in each other's arms. We were each other's excuse to stop working, and focus on each other's bodies. We tore into each other every second, feeling the need to re-explore every inch. She always had scuffed knees and bruised thighs from being a clumsy drunk, these little peculiar things that I remembered so well. I would write about her every day.
It was an odd day in January when I died; the snow had turned into freezing rain from the unusually warm winter and the finicky weather patterns. The rain was heavy, and clinked and clunked as if metal feet throwing a tantrum on the windowsill. Allison had called earlier telling me I had to pick her up from the filming location later that night as her ride had left the shoot for several days. She mostly stayed on set sleeping and eating there, but had a few days off. It was an hour drive.
In a way, my previous life was perfect. I lived in the prime of my life; I had love with a beautiful girl and I had the possibility to be important, to be famous. I don't know what I regretted, I was never told, but apparently something deep down bothered me. Maybe it was the fact that I never reached my potential, maybe I never got to see the end of the world, and maybe I felt I didn't love her enough. I didn't know, I don't know. The night when I woke up as a child, a small boy in the bunk bed that I shared with my younger brother. I remembered everything. A thirty-one year old man's thoughts in a five-year old's head. I went back to sleep and woke up as a kid again, nothing was retained and I lived my life as I would have. Things were slightly different though. I began soccer at a young age, staying fit and healthy. I became a popular student simply from that, I had more friends and girlfriends through my youth and I never started writing, I never had a reason to. My father more proud of me and my mother never stressing over my mental state as a child stayed together. My father made more money as he put more of himself into his work and eventually became the foreman of a machine shop. My mother went to school and got a degree in children's health and became a substitute teacher. These things made me question how well I knew my life, yet I would remember back to that vague morning when I first woke up, the flood of odd information that I thought was a sad movie I once saw as a child. In my original life, my parents divorced when I was fourteen. My father had money troubles for most of his life and my mother moved to Kentucky after more troubles with finding work and an inability to afford middle-class apartments. I was unsocial, fat, and unhappy and that led to my venting through writing. I never looked anyone in the face, and even in my new 'ideal' life, that seemed to be the only remaining thing. I wondered so often in if the people I saw and felt, and hugged and loved each day were just fictitious creations of an elaborate dream, wondering whether I was the only conscious mind on the planet. If I was the only one living a life capable of rational choice.
Despite me barely remembering my past life, most of what was important had vanished and the little that was left was odd instances of déjà vu. Some things didn't change, like my uncle's lapse in schizophrenia that happened during my ninth grade year. Only now in my new life, his lapse was far worse, originally my mother invited all of the family to her house on the fourth of July (she was divorced so my father couldn't protest this.) My uncle was with people he knew, who knew about his worsening condition and he was safe. In my new life, this didn't happen and my uncle was outside and beat a man to death with a river rock in a rural Kentucky metro park, where he would often wander. Instead of getting help, he was charged with manslaughter. These are things I could not change, but changed anyway. We were creatures of circumstance, of horrible and unjust circumstance. Creatures of reaction to change and emotionally depraved things that only we can describe as human nature.
After my uncle’s trial and sentence which had been particularly hard on my mother, a year had passed since I’d turned seventeen. I was playing on the high school soccer team, getting excellent grades. The sport itself was very rewarding, much how writing had been in my previous life; soccer had replaced my ability to vent emotionally with an ability to vent physically. I was quite the specimen, my hands were large and muscular, the veins and tendons were visible through my light tan skin. Every muscle moved in sync, and every action was reactionary from the past action. A ball was kicked, I ran faster. A ball was kicked; I would wrap my feet around the ball to accept the pass. It was a technical operation that my body maintained with precision. Quickly, I became very adept at playing soccer. I’d help my team get to state, and I was in the top ten national players in high school. I’d achieved the recognition I never had in my past life or an equal amount in a much shorter time. I was being looked at by college scouts, and had already been approached by some requesting to take their scholarship. Eventually I was pressured into going to Brown University, an Ivy League school. It was then when I wished to so greatly to sink into a sleep, a neighbor to a dirt that felt no jealousy, or fear, and in this feeling of abandon and loneliness I knew something in my life wasn’t right. I would with so much violent intent stare at the sun and curse the name that had been given to me, curse the curse, curse everything that had been put in front of me with no meaning. I longed for a girl I’d never seen, a cherried blonde, staking my heart in the hope of déjà vu. I wanted to die in a car wreck, a bomb in a skyscraper, a falling power line, something accidental, something unexpected and quietly to myself in my barren dorm I would say each night for a long time a quote that I knew from a painting my grandmother had, ‘So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep. O that thou wouldest hide me in Sheol…’

*

After my death, the thing that always shook me to my core was the fact that Allison and everyone I knew kept on living. Deep down maybe I wanted the world to stop when I did, but it didn't and everyone else went on. Allison was Slovenian, American born but had very strong roots in the culture and heritage. It showed in her face. A taught and square face with a shaped jaw. Hard edges with had a breath of strength and maturity. Yet, behind her near perfect bone structure were so many insecurities that had been stirred from the hands that birthed and fed her. A child of the mid-west, she grew up around De Pere, Wisconsin. Moving back and forth between there and Chicago. She had pale skin, translucent so one could see the blood rush to her face, or the pressure of a thumb that would leave red prints behind on her body. A cherry tint was constant and it seemed to be a natural thing along with her wonderful scent of cherry blossom perfume that hollowed the oxygen out of the air, circulating with her exhale and moving glance that she walked by or through. I first fell in love with her when her hair was a strawberry blonde, she had dyed it many colors and like the experiencing the first kiss, I remember her first hair color the most fondly. It was a soft cotton or pressed hay, and although the touch of dark velvet she had later in life moved me in many ways, I've always preferred the blonde. A soothing and youthful voice, one of a sleepy and affectionate child. Allison was the innocence I had left behind in my late teens. In my first life, I never went to college, I moved around a lot, back and forth between Ohio and Kentucky. I made trips to Wisconsin every month or so and stayed for several days, spending every waking minute with her. I never met, I never had a reason to move, I never skipped out on college in my new life. I never knew that longing and distance, the incredible love felt between two separate souls vying to be close. I never felt that. I never fell in love like I did.
Before we had moved to Tokyo, Allison was getting several tests re-done for possible Endometriosis. At the end of high school, she began to have serious and painful cramps, and having gone several months without a period she went to the doctor. They hadn’t any idea what was wrong with her, which was odd in this day and age. They told her the worst case scenario was that having children may pose as impossibility if the pains do not stop. Eventually they did stop after medicated shots, and they did some internal examinations on her ovaries. Although