Life's A Beach

Sitting under palm trees on a beach in Venezuela where the waves gently kissed the shore, eating a bowl of freshly grown organic fruit, Socrates logged onto the Internet and found out that he was dead. He’d been dead for a long time, reborn in this prelapsarian paradise where it never got cold and no-one wore shell suits or listened to techno music or drove SUVs, where there was no McDonalds or no Tescos, where children who lived the way they’d done for hundreds of years worshipped him almost as a demi-god from a Conrad novel, but now it was official, his old life in Ireland, where he was born as James, was now over, after his wife had dealt with the media she could quietly sneak off to join him and they could fuck like rabbits like they used to.
Not being able to tell anyone of this and knowing no other way to celebrate, he ran into the water and splashed around like a child who’d never seen the sea before. And then he realised the absurdity of what he was doing and rose from the water like our distant ancestors did and asked himself some serious questions.
How did it come to this, this absurd, Kafkaesque paradox that he needed his existence to be negated for him to really live, under a pseudonym on the other side of the world? Was this what he wanted for himself, or some fate thrust upon him by some mischievous omnipotent gods or by the chaotic randomness of the universe? He sat back, watched the waves ripple, and tried to recall the story of the events that brought him here.
He wouldn't remember it all. His memories would be blurry and subjective, like one of those old home movies that he appeared in the early eighties. But this was the way that it appeared to him.