Prologue, Heaven.
In the most literal sense, Heaven is everything you ever imagined it to be.
If you imagined Heaven as Brooklyn rather than big, pearly white gates and houses made of clouds you’ll get a 400-square-foot studio apartment surrounded by skyscrapers covered in graffiti instead. In fact, you probably crossed a semi-normal-looking bridge to get here. Instead of the big white one made with the most fluffy and prestigious clouds sprinkled with that gold sparkly shit. With shiny, white round pearls on the tops of the cylinder columns that hold the thing together.
Unfortunately, I did imagine Heaven as a place with a big fluffy bridge, big pearly white gates, and more clouds than I ever needed to see in a millennium. So many God damned clouds. You’d be surprised by how nauseating all-white everything gets after days upon days of being blinded by all the sterile gleam.
Regarding the notion of the afterlife being literally exactly how you imagined it. This applies to God as well. Growing up, my mother told me God and Jesus were white men with long beards, dressed in togas. When I got here and met the man himself, that’s what he looked like. Except for Jesus, yes to me he did resemble a white man with a beard who sometimes wore a toga to formal events, but mostly he just looked like a straight-up hipster.
If I wanted to get into specifics. I’d say Jesus is a hipster who spends too much of his time drinking New England India Pale Ale as he pretends to come off as enlightened. The word Jesus described himself as is “woke.” However, I would like to call him a drunk sociopath with daddy issues and far too much free time on his hands. Hell, he even seemed to glorify New York as a romantic idea just like many of the hipsters who seemed to flock to the gentrified Williamsburg as if the place itself would turn them into some sort of new-aged James Dean type.
I would imagine that if you’re someone who envisioned Heaven as Brooklyn perhaps God would also appear as some sort of hipster or some other kind of New York stereotype. The types of folk who fill the coffee houses that have unfinished brick and jazz music lightly bouncing from wall to wall.
However, when it comes to my man Jesus, I honestly think a hipster who consumes too much IPA and falsifies enlightenment is who he really is at his core. He would exist as that no matter how you imagined Heaven to be. Except for me, he is all of that dressed occasionally in a toga for formal events. Usually neglecting to wear underwear.
As I said previously, for me, almost every god-damn thing is a cloud. The ground, my home, and parts of the building where I go to work every day. Parts of God’s mansion and even parts of Jesus’s mansion. As well as a few of the bars on Main Street. Every single thing. The bright side is, we are encouraged to look on the bright side, I can walk everywhere with absolutely no shoes on and I would say that is more comfortable than wearing the silly sandals they distribute. So, I would imagine that if you are someone who imagined Heaven as Brooklyn you probably would not be so comfortable going shoeless, would you? But you probably would be going to an office that might resemble something other than a cloud-like Pantheon. And not everything would be a blindingly pearly white, at least you have that going for you.
