When I was alive, the idea of Angels were terrifying. Heaven scared the shit out of me.
I didn't get how you could have any kind of perfection. I especially didn't get how you got perfection in a place that people insisted was in any way exclusive to who it did or didn't let in.
I couldn't imagine a place that could lock out a loved one and still call itself perfect.
You got enough faiths and myths promising it in other shades, too. Not a one ever gave me an answer to what that meant, either.
You don't have a frame of reference for perfect in an imperfect world. The only answer I ever got was some handwaved "better than this."
I came back again to the thought of an exclusive, perfect afterlife. A place that could have you, and maybe not others you cared for. And even if it did have them, perfect would insist it had them at your best for you, not necessarily the best for them.
I got to thinking of heaven as a place where you just got locked in your own head, watching illusions of what you wanted to experience. Perfection through falsehood. Ultimate, blissful hyperreality.
I didn't want to spend forever staring up at an empty sky, watching shadows of what I loved. That's all I could see in the idea of a heaven. Infinite, empty, disconnected contentment.
When I arrived here, when this place offered itself as imperfect, all I could do was break down into tears of relief.
