Conversations With My Id

You don’t actually go to heaven when you die. I hate to spoil the suprise or let you down, but you don’t.
You go to this place with nothing around but more people and an almost beige light that covers everyone. They, or rather we, aren’t actually beige, just the light. There are no clouds or gates or people with wings. There are no halos or white gowns in sight. There is no one waiting by an entryway with a big book that contains the life story of every man, woman and child on the planet. Nothing like that.
It seems sad but it’s not. Well, that is to say that it’s not sad in the same way that a Denny’s isn’t sad. That was the first thing I thought of when I got here. I felt like if I saw a claw machine and a spinning rack of pies I wouldn’t be shocked. Denny’s has a strange way of being comfortable without making you feel as though you want to stay there a while and relax. That’s how this place is: almost familiar in its comforts with a total lack of other appeal.
Everyone looks the same too. We aren’t all the same age but we all look as we remember looking on Earth. At least we guess so. There are no mirrors so we have to rely on what others see in us and how they describe those traits. I wanted to make that a game on my first day but no one would play along. I guess they already had that idea. I didn’t let that stop me though. I came up with no less than ten other games in the following five day. That’s two games a day! But still no one would play. I couldn’t figure out why until I finally upset someone with my constant line of questioning.
“We won’t play because we all hate it here!” the man said. He spit when he talked and as it turned out even though our physical bodies were gone, saliva travels with the soul. I realized that others had been here for a very long time. When I tried to figure out who had been here the longest I kept coming to the same conclusion: no one kept track. I had because I had only been here a few days but even I reluctantly stopped counting too.
I had always assumed that there would be a place like this. In Sunday school as a kid they would tell me about purgatory. It always sounded to me like Heaven’s waiting room or a halfway house between life and eternity, regardless if you went up or down when they let you out. Unfortunately it’s seeming more and more like a destination. Maybe we here are the adequate ones. The C students. The high school diploma people. Maybe we never killed anyone but we did have a lot of premartial sex. I know I did. Regardless, we are all here for an unknown length of time and none of us know what happens next.
We also don’t know how we got here. I can’t remember how I came to this place. The few people who have exploded at me out of contempt or confusion admitted not knowing how they had arrived here either. I know it isn’t really that important a fact to understand but my curiosity came here with me and it seems to be my only constant compainion. I’ve been trying for the last few day to make friends with one of the younger guys. I noticed him on my first day and I’ve been following him ever since, but he doesn’t know it. I’ve been keeping my distance but I’ll talk to him eventually. Maybe then I’ll have another companion. I remember when I first saw him. Our eyes didn’t meet but I felt – I knew – I needed to get closer to him. Maybe not out of any romantic feelings but rather out of survival. I’m going to need friends, I recall thinking, if I’m going to make it here for any amount of time. That, and…well, he was very cute.
His name was Tom but everyone called him Boy. It hurts to talk about him in the past tense but that can’t be helped now. Boy was tall, six feet four if he was an inch. His shoulders were broad but his chest was flat and shapeless. His chin was so slight that from many angles it looked as though his bottom lip melted into his neck. His nose was sharply pointed but somehow looked right at home where it was. It was probably because of his eyes. The eyes were the bluest I’ve ever seen. I can’t liken the color to anything here given the lack of colors other than beige but maybe there was a blue back home…maybe.