=The World Without All of You=

I'm walking home from Starbucks when the Last Judgment is announced. The streets are suddenly filled with the living and the dead. The dead all look confused, like you do when you wake up in a strange bed after a one-night stand and for several moments you don't know where you are. For that matter, the living look very much the same. So this is it? The big event we've all been awaiting for over two-thousand years. To be perfectly honest, there's not much to it. I find it rather anti-climactic. Rumor has it that we're all to be sorted and then loaded accordingly onto one of two starships. One ship is going to a good place; the other to a place not-quite-as-good, but perfectly tolerable enough. As it turns out, after all the commotion, there wasn't as much difference between good and evil as we were led to believe. To be honest, I'm rather disappointed by the cheesy sci-fi nature of it all. I had always asserted that whatever happened after life it would be beyond our comprehension, something we could never have imagined in a million years, human imagination being fixed and limited as it is, a prisoner of its own paradigms, etc. Well I was wrong again ("Ha! No surprise there," I can hear you saying) as I was wrong about so many things. It was exactly as we imagined! 

Anyway, to make a long story short, I'm not taken by either ship. They both lift off without me, hovering in the clouds for a few dramatic seconds and then escaping the atmosphere with a whoosh! in a glowing streak of silver glimmer that eventually fades away. And here I am, back at the Starbucks, left behind to write this letter or story or parable or whatever it might be to you. Although it's not really to you—you are gone among the judged, the sorted, the vanished-forever, scattered among the stars and I'm still here roaming around in this suddenly empty world. But it's not so bad, really. Actually, it's quite nice. It's exactly the sort of world I was always best suited for, to tell you the truth.

So I guess you could say I am writing this to myself. Why bother, you might ask. For the same reason as always, I might answer. For the same reason I talk to myself or hum a tune with no one there to listen or dream for that matter. I do it to explain the situation to myself. To entertain myself. To keep myself company. That's how I can live without you, without anyone, beyond judgment. Just in case you wanted to know. Just in case you asked. Which, so far as I know, you haven't—and won't.