I died. It wasn't a particularly spectacular death, in fact it was fairly embarrassing. I suppose I have nothing better to do right now than to relate to you the sorry state of my corporeal body before I left it.
I tripped, you see. Such a trivial act, but I hadn't been paying attention to where I was going, and fell. I used to silently laugh, thinking on it, that my first instinct was to save my phone, reasoning that I would heal, but my phone would break. But this occupied the use of one hand, one hand that may, or may not, have saved my life. My other hand hit the ground first, but bent back with a horrible crack. My head was next.
So I died. The next thing I could see, I was standing just inside a huge chasm, tapering endlessly behind me into a tiny white pinprick of light, while a large gate stood in front of me. My first thought, I remember, was that I was dreaming, because I had grown to believe that there is nothing after death. I believe I felt curiously relieved, standing at the gates to heaven, because, oddly, that meant I was alive.
But I was wrong, and not for the last time in my afterlife.
Julian, a low, dark voice had echoed within my mind, I am afraid you are certainly quite dead.
My head was suddenly filled with memories that were not my own, images from the eyes of a woman, then doctors and undertakers, and finally, a small scene from the perspective of the man who pushed the button that sent my body to be burned. Then I was back in my own... being. Shaking, alone, and very, very dead.
I have, far too often, wondered why I went to such a cliché as the 'Pearly Gates,' and the most suitable of the two-thousand, seven-hundred and eleven reasons I came up with, was that it was the closest thing that the deepest recesses of my belief -or lack thereof- allowed for the crossroads, and that everything after death is subjective.
You are one of the tricky ones, the voice spoke. Not evil, but certainly not good, and not even a believer, but too good to go to hell for eternity. So you will go there until you can answer the question that has plagued your species and many others for countless aeons; 'Why?' It spoke this almost mechanically, and I imagine now that those lines had been spoken to an almost infinite number of souls before me.
It is odd, and even now I wonder 'Why?' I have decided that The Lord God, or Lucifer, or both as one (or would it be Both?), or whoever was speaking to me, gave me a question just 'in case,' so they didn't feel guilt, if indeed they could, for sending every complicated soul. It was a convenient get-out clause that allowed Him/him/them/whatever to forget about us without having us clutter up heaven.
But that's just my idea. I have had others telling me, in the one-way conversation that everyone does now, their own theories, and occasionally I have graced their ideas with a glance in their direction. One person I even looked in the eye, just to break the monotony. It helps them, I think, to know I am still here.
The next thing that happened is simple enough to describe, the cave tore away into shreds, and I was falling. Cursed as I am with a near-perfect post-mortem memory, I have counted that I fell for three hundred years to the second, and fell into a pool of unimaginably unoriginal lava. I knew, before I reached it, that the afterlife would be precisely like the books. And I had pre-emptively shed my tears for it. It hurt me more that I was burning for my sins than the burning did. I guess I'm still just stubborn.
I spent several years, I think (forgive me, but time was not what my mind was on at that part of my afterlife. To remember, it helps not to be consumed with pain), tumbling and swimming and screaming. Every breath brought fresh heat and fresh magma into my lungs. Occasionally, I would hit what I assumed was the rocky walls of the cavern. And, brief though they were, they did give me moments of false hope.
