“BECAUSE I DIDN’T THINK I DESERVED IT! Okay?” Then slowly, in a sad whisper, “Because I didn’t think I deserved it.” Sounds so stupid now. But that’s why. I couldn’t repeat it. I couldn’t live up to it. I felt so selfish and was filled with so much shame for even wanting it. Every voice in my head told me I wasn’t enough and I was never going to be. The feeling was so overwhelming that I broke the one rule I ever made for myself: “If I lose this battle, I do it alone. Nobody else can be involved.”
I broke that rule when I included the driver of the car. He never saw me.
God sat still. Silent. I was tremendously uncomfortable and nervously shifted on the couch. Please, say something. Anything. I wanted to crawl under the couch and hide. If my definition of God was truly the sum of my experiences, including the people I knew, loved, and respected, well, I now felt like I was letting them all down.
“I know it was a big mistake,” I said, finally. “It’s something I must live with—or whatever, you know what I mean—for the rest of eternity, I guess. Every time one of my friends dies and comes here, I’ll have to tell them the truth.” My God. How will I tell Jess? How will I tell her that I didn’t think I was good enough even after my perfect day?
When someone died from suicide, if anyone left behind snickered about selfishness, I was always the first to put an end to it. “We have no idea the kind of pain that person must have been feeling. We have no idea about the battle raging in that person’s head,” I’d say. I could imagine it because I felt it.
For decades, I managed to win the daily battle of staying alive. That’s what each day was. A battle for life. Sometimes, the battles were easy, but sometimes, they were excruciating in a way that few would understand. None of my friends really knew. I had won so many battles. Thousands upon thousands. Almost all of them. I had a nearly perfect record. But this is the kind of game that losing just once—even if you’ve won a million or a billion times previously—is all that matters. The one loss is all that matters.
God tried to settle me. “What would you do differently?”
I started rambling. “Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve come to realize that maybe peace isn’t what I needed to be searching for. I needed to surrender first. Surrender and accept. If you’re asking how I would change things . . . I’m not entirely sure I’d be able to. I’d certainly want to be more open to accepting myself. I’d want to stop the chase to be something more or different than I was. Stop feeling like I was only valuable if someone else said I was.”
I took a deep breath. “But I can’t say for sure what that would do. I was always better at helping others than helping myself. I don’t regret that part. Not for a second. I suppose, if anything, I’m sorry I didn’t do more of that. I just didn’t know what that meant. I still don’t think I understand what the words of those intuitives mean. They don’t matter, anyway. I still don’t really know what I would do.”
I laughed as I said, “Long story short, I guess I’d like to think I would be more accepting of myself. I’d write. I’d create. All in. Whatever came after that . . . I have no idea. I just now realized how the importance of being an artist or a creative person actually held me back. What would I do? No labels. No fitting in. No belonging. I’d be all of me. And I’d love myself for it.”
God sat in more silence. She was good at this. She stared at me. I met her gaze as best as I could but had to look away from time to time. Was she thinking? Was she even here anymore? I don’t think she was blinking, and given that she was more or less just a spirit and not really that body—maybe she had taken flight? I waved my hand in front of her face like you do to someone who is daydreaming. I stopped short of saying, “Earth to God.” She just stared straight ahead.
Finally, she took a long, deep breath that felt like she was on the edge of frustration. “You haven’t figured it out yet, have you?”
“Figured out what yet?”
“You. This place. Where you are. What you’re doing here.”
“Well, I sort of thought I just finished painstakingly detailing how I killed myself.” I tried to laugh a little to make a joke of it. It wasn’t funny. “I sort of thought I was in heaven.”
And then another bomb. “You’re not.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
An elderly man saves a drowning eight-year-old boy in China. It was discovered that thirty years earlier, the same man saved the boy’s father from drowning.13
Oh, fuck.What the hell? This isn’t heaven?Where the hell am I? Was this a dream? A nightmare? Was I going to wake up in a cold sweat on some street corner? How long had I been asleep? Metaphorically, I know I’d been asleep for pretty much my whole life save a few moments here and there, but literally, I mean.
God cleared her throat to pull my attention back, then proceeded to challenge me. “Erik, think about all that you just told me. Think about the life you lived. Think about your experiences. I can’t tell you. You need to see it for yourself.”
I didn’t understand. I had no idea what she was talking about. I felt anxious. I wanted to throw up. I felt stupid. Blondie, of course, was having none of it and remained in her bliss. Whatever God was talking about, she was in on it. I felt lost. I stared at God. She just stared back. What was I missing? What the fuck am I missing?
“Can I have a hint?” I finally cracked.
“Nope.” Mrs. Brown was enjoying my pain a little too much.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to replay what I had experienced. There had to be a clue somewhere. What was I missing? The first thing I saw was God’s house, or whoever the hell’s house it was. Blondie and I were coming up on it, and, oh wow, that’s weird; I remember the beautiful driveway lined with roses, but I totally missed the line-up of tricked-out golf carts in what looked like a valet area. They were the super cool ones that my dad and his friends drove around in Palm Desert. Were they there before, or did I make them up because I was just talking about CartAds? Doesn’t matter. This whole thing can’t be about golf carts.
There’s Ira. There’s me running through the house as I figure out . . . a billiards room? Where did that come from? That wasn’t in the house back when it was being sold, and I certainly don’t remember it when Blondie and I were getting the grand tour from Ira. I was going to open a pool hall once. Funny, with the same college roommate. Billiards was blowing up as the go-to bar game, and game rooms were popping up everywhere. We secured an awesome space, but city codes shut us down. The laws hadn’t caught up with the trends, and the college town in which we lived prohibited bars from having more than two pool tables. Fucking idiotic. Just another dream that died.
My eyes instantly opened wide. There was Ira. Smiling knowingly. My heart was leaping through my chest in the same way it did when I was on that rock in Joshua Tree a million years ago. I didn’t know how to ask. I felt silly for even having the thoughts.
“Yes?” God teased.
“This whole thing has been a setup!”
“Explain what you mean.”
“I’m not . . . this isn’t . . . I mean, it’s not . . .” I was stammering to find the words. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, but I just didn’t know how to say it. Finally, “This isn’t my heaven. It’s my dead dreams? This has been one long look at all the dreams I let die. CartAds, the pool hall, but—”
“Look closer.”
Holy shit. Willie, the young baseball player, was just the manifestation of my very first dream—to play professional baseball. I was going to play for the California Angels or Los Angeles Dodgers. I was going to be the greatest outfielder who ever lived.
And Ira. I saw him because he was a symbol of all the projects I let die. Not just the web series with him, but all of them. The books, the movie scripts, the acting. I think he represented anything, everything creative. Rosa, the old Italian lady who helped me inside, was the dream I had for my relationship with my mom, or really my entire family.
Mort. Mort was the romance I dreamed about. The love at first sight. The family. The unbreakable bond I wanted. I dreamed of it. Even if I didn’t think I deserved it. Every person represented something I had given up on. Every single person at the dinner table. They represented dead dreams of travel, of going back to school, of being a wise, spiritual mentor. They represented dead dreams of, well, all of it. Jond? The dead dreams of my childhood. The boy in the hat? That was the ultimate dead dream. The dream of me for myself. Becoming and being me.
Perhaps, I finally got it. Fate’s charge wasn’t to make God laugh by putting random people together. Fate’s charge was to help people make their soul path come true. They simply had to accept the invitation. I shook my head and laughed a little under my breath.
“Is this what purgatory is?” I asked. “People talk about it as some kind of unknown dark place, but is it really about coming to grips with your lies? Only then do we get to see what heaven really is?” It made sense to me. Before, I couldn’t understand why there were still so many damn questions in heaven. It’s because I wasn’t there yet.
“You’re still missing one really important point,” God offered.
“Are you going to sit there in silence and make me suffer until I figure it out?”
God sighed, smiled, and then explained the missing piece. “This entire experience,” he said, “is yours and only yours.”
He went on to explain that nobody has the same life. Nobody sees things exactly the same way. Even people who worship the same God experience it differently. Our entire existence is created in our own hearts and minds. It’s our canvas to paint. We lose track of just how much we have within our control. But only if we can learn to control our thoughts. Only if we can believe. In ourselves. In something. In anything. That’s exactly where I tripped over and over and over again. Nobody ever has the same experience in heaven. Some may never reconcile their dead dreams. It may not be that important.
