Jinki lie on his back, floating in the warm sea. It was a breezy summer night, and Jinki had gone out to be by himself as per the usual. He was 'in a mood', as his father called it.

He snorted. A mood. That's what his emotionally distant parents called it whenever Jinki was deeply depressed.

In a morbid, possibly suicidal frame of mind.

It happened more often than Jinki admitted to anyone, even the expensive therapist his father paid for. He laughed the hardest, smiled the widest, made the funniest jokes so no one would suspect.

He washed further away from the shore, gentle waves cradling him with an almost motherly touch. Concern was only a distant buzz at the back of his mind.

Salty seawater splashed in his mouth and his thoughts shifted to all the people who'd come to scatter their loved one's ashes out to sea.

His mouth was full of the ashes of dead people.

He realized that the thought wasn't as disturbing as it could have been. Should have been.

Jinki pondered what happened to the ashes after being dumped. After they had mixed into the water, did they evaporate into rain clouds?

If they did.. Didn't that mean that whenever it rained, there were dead people caressing his and every other living person's skin, every inch of it?

Quite literally, Jinki realized, people bathed daily in the ashes of their dead. Drank them in. Death was everywhere, in more ways than one.

'What if heaven was tied to your physical body?'  He wondered, and felt a lump in his throat.

If this was heaven, he wanted no part of it.