September

As the news spread, more people came out with similar stories, though they involved a tiny fraction of the returner population. Because of the initial negative public reaction to the returners, the couples didn’t feel safe exposing their loved ones to risk or being accused of unnatural perversity, so they kept their relationships secret. But as much as the world had changed in the last couple of months, and the line between the living and undead faded, coming out now didn’t seem as big a deal as it was before.

This finally proved why some were resurrected while others weren’t. Those who returned, all returned because there was someone they loved still among the living. The Paulines had been saying this all along, that all they wanted was to be reunited with their loved ones, but nobody took it at face value, that it was literally the only thing they wanted. This explained why there generally seemed to be a limit on the max age of the returners, who would not resurrect if their loved ones were already dead, and also why there were many reports of some returners dying a second time during the Mayday events, as they had lost their loved ones to the conflict, and the tether holding them to the world was severed. There was some lingering confusion over the outliers, the much older returners. Though as the last year had drastically reshaped humanity’s perception of mortality, the dominant theory that emerged was that these returners were in love with immortals that lived anonymously among regular people.

The stories of the couples reunited after being separated by death were bittersweet. Finding your soul mate is hard enough in regular life, but to find them a second time amid apocalyptic chaos was next to impossible. If only people still buried those close to them in family plots in their backyards, instead of massive cemeteries on the outskirts of town, these reunions would have been more frequent, and the returners wouldn’t have been cursed with having to wander helplessly in search of their loves. Still, now that the reason was understood, many volunteer organizations popped up to help identify and reunite returners with those close to them. Although, this did not always have a happy ending, as not everyone could stomach such a reunion, especially if it had been years or even decades in the making. It seemed that the “till death do us part” clause in the marriage vows was there for just this reason. So, many of the older returners, just like many of the older living people, had to keep drifting alone, unable to establish new bonds.

The practice of tagging the returners with GPS tracking to analyze their movements had by now become wide-spread. While early on in the phenomenon there was no sign of coordinated group movement, as time went on, certain patters did appear, as clusters of returners began to move towards and congregate around areas with caves and volcanoes. Were these the poor souls that were rejected by their loved ones after conquering death itself to see them again? These returners seemed more tense and irritable. They no longer tried to communicate anything to anyone, just humming that strange song louder and louder.

These groups looked like the saddest of funeral processions, composed of only the dead themselves, with no friends or loved ones to see them off, as they searched for an opening to return underground, since nobody would dig a fresh grave for them.

Was this what love amounted to? A mere physical attraction that fades at the same rate as beauty. This was definitely the view expounded by the world’s monastic traditions. In many of the training manuals for monks throughout history, Christian and Buddhist alike, the main visualization exercise recommended to those struggling with maintaining celibacy was to imagine the object of one’s desire as a corpse, gradually decomposing, with first the skin, then the flesh rotting away, until nothing but the bare skeleton is left, indistinguishable from any other.

But then these texts were written for a particular purpose, a certain kind of training that did not at all come naturally to most people. Could the technique not be reversed? When two people are together for a long time, they tend to notice the effects of aging much less that people who only see each other rarely, because the daily incremental changes are tiny by comparison. Moreover, those who have known each other since childhood usually don’t see the other as they appear now, but as a kind of composite image that layers the many ways they’ve looked throughout their lives. This is especially evident in how parents often see their offspring as children even when their kids are well into adulthood.

Why couldn’t decomposition be countered by a recomposition, turning time backwards and reversing the ravages of entropy, visualizing the corpse getting younger until it appears in the fullness of life?

Too much had happened though. An ex who has been gone a long time is not always welcome back, regardless of how good their reason for leaving was. So, while a small percentage of returners succeeded in reuniting with their significant others, and had their affection restore them to their lost life, for most, it turned out to be a nightmare that they visited upon their loved ones by only ever wanting to see them again.