Eden

Twenty

I try to work all this out.

Or at least, to work out enough to get by. I start to look at people's faces, wondering if that might help. Faces might tell me something, I think. Who these people are, perhaps, and therefore where we are. Which particular country or part of the world we're in, I suppose.

I look around hopefully, wondering if that might tell me something, but unfortunately, fairly soon, I realize that it won't. There is no one particular kind of face that stands out here, not really. Everyone just looks ordinary. Or rather, the people here look like a mix of all the different kinds of people there are, as if some of everyone has ended up here, and so I can't really see differences to look.

I learn as much, doing that, as I would if I looked around inside a busy airport, and then tried to work out which airport it was, and where in the world I was, just from the faces I saw nearby.

I can't tell enough to learn where I am. Not really. Not properly. Trying to work out where I am this way isn't really going to help.

As I look, though, at the faces, I start to think about the ages of the people I can see. There are most ages of people here, but no small children anywhere. There are no children, although there are all the other ages you'd expect in a crowd of people, and in the proportions you'd expect, too.

I stop and think about that.

There are different ages of people here. That seems to mean either that people age here, which is possible, or that people come back to life in this place as they were when they died. As in, we aren't resurrected as some perfect version of ourselves, all young and healthy and flawless, with all our wounds healed, and all our injuries washed away. It doesn't work like that, apparently. I'm still young, but not everyone is. They're the age they were when they died.

We're all the age we were when we died, and my wrists are unhealed, too.

I think, and look at my arms. My wrists were unhealed when I awoke, which makes me think that injuries aren't healed, which makes it seem as though we don't change that much, once we're here, which would also imply we don't age.

We don't age, I think. We stay the age we are.