Heaven is for Real?

I’m not sure what happens after this but I don’t think it’s anything grand. I don’t think we meet again, if we ever even make it. And if we do, would you still want to? I’ve worn this version of me out, and I don’t know what else I’ve got. I remember the first time I realized I was in the world: four years old when I came online, became conscious I was alive mid-plunge— someone had shoved me into the deep end of the public pool. It was nothing cruel, just kid logic. But the water didn’t care how innocent the moment was. Cold punched me clean through the inside of my skull and everything lit up: channels fine-tuned into something I hadn’t known was broadcasting. I wasn’t breathing, but I was Awake, and when someone yanked me up by half an arm and a handful of hair, when the air hit my face again, when I realized other people were there, chlorine, a sky— it felt like heaven for a minute, or at least how I'd later hear it described. I no longer believe in that, not really, not in the after kind. But that moment sticks— footsteps in wet cement, part of me that knew I’d been somewhere and wasn’t anymore.