Zona

The second night I returned.....

to find myself standing on a ledge staring into a lithium horizon of pastel wavelengths. I looked behind as a wall of eight doors withdrew leaving an emerald carpet of summer prairie. A velour lawn chair appeared by my side and I was dressed in a green fleece sweatsuit bottom and a gray cotton tee shirt.

A man appeared and told me to take my seat so I did. He explained that I would spend eternity here alone. I would have a perfect memory of everything I had done in my life. Everything I had learned. Every person who I had met. Every song I had heard and every food that I had tasted. I though of a song and it played. I thought of a dish and I was savoring. I longed for a person and she appeared in my mind and smiled for me.

I had reached heaven in my mind.

The man touched my shoulder and the song stopped, the flavors subsided, and the image went away.

"I must go now but you will stay here. You will always have the ability to hear and feel what you have just experienced. You will also always be alone here. That is what you wished for in your life. To be alone. To feel things alone and to have a calm silence about you and a nice breeze in your face. This is your eternity".

I asked. "Is this heaven"?

"You will decide that. It is what you wanted and your life was such that in the overall judgment it was what you were given. Maybe you deserved more, maybe less. There are an infinite number of possibilities. For some there is God and for some there is Satan. For most there is a somewhere in between".

Then he went away.

I have never been awakened by a more peaceful morning.