God is real, and he’s terrified.
Recently I was in a car crash, I’m told some fucker ran me off the road and my car tumbled over. Damn near broke my spine, I was lucky to only suffer severe head wounds. Unfortunately, those wounds left me comatose. And thus I received the classic Hollywood out of body experience, except my body was in a box where the walls were as black as void, but I could see myself as if I was in broad daylight. And guess who stood before me.
None other than Morgan fucking Freeman.
Alright, so I’m going to count some points real quick before we get into the meat of this loaf.
I was confused, God was confused, I asked if he was actually Morgan Freeman and we had an awkward back and forth about how he has no form that the human mind can process so the human mind will instead substitute him with whatever I perceive as god. Apparently that’s Morgan Freeman.
This conversation is burned into my mind, playing like a movie, word for word ringing in my ears like tinnitus. Now, for the average joe, I don’t think this is a weird result from a vivid, LSD-like dream. However, I suffer from Aphantasia, so I’m fucking sent right now. This shit sucks, my head is loud and it hurts. It’s a wonder how people exist like this.
I’m now under psychiatric evaluation because I’m swearing up and down the hospital halls that I’ve spoken with God. Stellar.
I’ll try to keep this as formatted as possible, I’m not a writer nor a reader, but I am an english major who gives zero fucks about most grammatical nuances and has read far too many classics because “lItErAtUrE!” It shouldn’t be too messy.
I remember nothing from the crash. Not even leading up to it. I left work, and woke up in the hospital bed. But in between, I had a dream about God. My dreams have always been wildly vivid, and I’ve read a bit into lucid dreaming, but I’ve never been able to master it. Regardless, this dream felt very under my control and easy to navigate. No weird skips or ticks in reality where shit makes zero sense after you wake up.
It was as if I had gone from sitting in my car to standing, and I was facing a great nothingness. Absolute darkness ahead, below, above, and all around me. Despite that, my body shone like I was under direct sunlight. It wasn’t warm, or cold, and it didn’t really feel like I was standing on anything.
I turned to see Morgan Freeman standing there. What a fucking sentence, I never thought I’d ever be able write that and it not be a straight lie. He wore the same white suit as from the movie, and looked at me like I’d just picked my nose in front of him.
“Would you care to speak?” He asked. Then I countered with the whole why am I meeting with Morgan Freeman in the goddamn Boötes, and then ensued the whole awkward exchange that doesn’t really matter.
“So you… are God?” I asked, and he nodded. I didn’t know what else to do, so I bowed? “I’m not bowing out of love, but more out of shock that you’re real.”
“I do not require your love,” he said with some cryptic edge to his voice.
“Why am I here?” Figured brass tacks was the way to go.
“You are here to help me answer a question I’ve been longing to solve.”
“Why me?”
“Why anyone? Or, how about everyone. I need the input of every human, from every perspective. Yours included.”
“I’m not following, G.” (I didn’t say ‘G’, but imagine).
“Before you can know the question, you must know the truth. Let us start with your relationship with me. You are agnostic, correct?”
I nodded.
“And what are you thinking right now?”
“I’m thinking about how to talk my way out of hell, but I know that probably isn’t gonna happen.”
“An understandable stance. Like there are three ways to interact with me, directly, peripherally, or not at all, you are showing one of the three most common reactions to this meeting. Dodging the shock of my existence to secure your own eternity.”
“I’m guessing you don’t like that.”
“I could not care less. You humans have me all wrong. In some ways, it’s adorable. In others, it’s funny. In most ways, however, it brings me great sorrow.”
His demeanor was consistently frozen, and analytical. “How many people have you done this with?” I asked.
“Tens of billions.”
I scoffed and smiled. “No shot.”
“I have interviewed nigh every soul that has ever died. Even the newborns who could not speak, for even a baby has its views on the universe, regardless of how naïve. Every human is slightly unique, and I search for the one with an answer.”
“So, what? My ticket is punched, so now I get a pow wow with the big man upstairs? What’s the point of this?”
“Search your mind, first. Is there anything you would like to know?”
I stopped to think. A few questions lined up.
First things first. “Am I going to hell?”
God cracked the smallest grin. “I find it amusing that this is always the first question from those who are not brainwashed to believe in me. Those who proclaim love for me feel entitled to their eternity, but little do they know that all humans are entitled to eternity to a point.”
“Okay. That doesn’t really answer my question.”
“Well, let’s see. You lived a life of poverty. Theft for you was like a second language, but it was not spiteful. It was survival, and I can understand that. You harbored powerful hatred, but your love was twice as potent for those who earned it. That balanced out. You were suspicious of all, righteously so, but still accepted everyone so long as they kept their distance. I would say you were above average for a human. By your standards, however, you did not have full belief in me. Where do you think that puts you?”
“Listen, man… I think those of us who are left to wonder are justified. I did what I could to be a good person.”
“You did take life. Not without reason, but took it nonetheless. Is that forgivable?”
I was afraid to answer. “It was self defense. Him or me. Him or my family.”
“Is it forgivable?”
“I don’t have to forgive myself for doing what was the only right thing.”
“Perfect. You did nothing wrong. Are you going to hell?”
“Not if I made the decision, but I don’t get to choose that, do I?”
“No, you don’t. It does help to believe in yourself, though. I’ll end the suspense; no, you will not be going to hell.”
I sighed in existential relief.
“I will be, however.”
My mouth went dry, and as if the whole situation was as real as me writing this right now, my stomach dropped to the ground. My eyes even watered a little.
“That’s impossible, though. You made hell, why would you send yourself there?”
“Hell was not made, it was manifested. I made Heaven, not hell. What humans understand as damnation is simply the consequence of my existence. For all matter, there is antimatter. For every dead, there is a coffin. Mine is hell.”
“This is insane. Can I wake up now?” I asked, pinching myself and stamping my foot on the ground.
“You could wake up. Much unlike the vast majority of those I bring to this meeting, you are yet on the brink of life. Your fate has not been chosen, and it is looking as though you shall live.”
Clearly I did. Kind of wish I hadn’t.
“Okay, so you’re afraid you’re going to hell. That’s crazy. How are you going to end up there? You’re God, for fuck’s sake,” I said, then biting my lips thinking my tongue had slipped. He didn’t seem to care, though.
“It requires a great length of sins to arrive in the brimstone. Many sins travel farther than others. Humans assume the greatest sins, though they’re all pointless. Like the premise that hell was built for nonbelievers, your rulers of ancient only invented these ‘sins’. The truest sin of all is treating your fellow man as lesser than yourself. That can be construed in many ways, most of which are manners of harm. Ultimately, hell is for those who commit the truest of sins.”
“What was your sin, then?”
“A mere three million have ever asked that question…” He said, and took a deep breath. “Your people see ‘playing God’ as an ultimate sin. You cannot attempt to mantle me, or even pretend to be me. Well, that sin extends to even God himself,” he said with his arms widespread and a broken smile. “I created, but creation is flimsy, and delicate. It molds, and rots, and falls apart. It dies.”
“I suppose. But it’s a cycle, right? Even stars rebirth through nebulae.”
“It’s funny you mention stars. Unfortunately, no, not all of creation exists on a wheel. Many aspects of existence are linear, with a beginning, middle, and end. My existence is linear. Yours, however, is cyclical.”
“How is that?”
“The human perception of Heaven is regarded vastly different in all kinds of religions. Some of them are close, most are egregiously far from the truth. If there was one that I could say is the closest, it would be Buddhism.”
“What? Like reincarnation, Nirvana, ascension and what not?”
“Reincarnation. The soul is a cyclical being. Your specific soul has traveled through countless bodies.”
“If that’s the case, then you and I have had this conversation before, right?”
“Almost. The soul stays the same, but the person is different every time. You share very few similarities with your past lives. A human is very much the summation of their upbringing; it has very little to do with your soul, as the soul does not interact directly with the body. Little do you humans know, not every one of you has a soul. Those who don’t are few, but can be problematic.”
“Why is that?”
“We can leave it at problematic. The soulless humans do not cycle. Once they die, they’re gone forever. It is nothing to worry yourself with.”
I squinted at him. “Okay… I think I get it. What is Heaven, then? Actually?”
“You could see it as a realm of light,” he said, and as he spoke this, the black box we stood in roared to life, placing us in the midst of an ivory sky. All around us were elegant, rolling clouds, with swirling paths of light zipping throughout the open air. A golden sun shone high above us in the center of the sky, dim enough to look at but bright enough to captivate. The white backdrop seemed endless. “Heaven is a medium. When your body perishes, your soul comes here to exist in perfect bliss, unburdened by the hardships of existence. Where we currently stand is the center of the universe.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s poisoned.”
I furrowed my brow at God. As his expression soured, the golden sun was tainted a pinkish-red, and the streams of light that whizzed around us were then stuck in place, paralyzed, but vibrating violently. And… Screaming. They were screaming so fucking loud.
I fell to my knees, hands on my ears, trying to drown out their shrieks with my own yelling. Within a moment, it stopped, and the box was black again.
“What the fuck?!”
“That is your Heaven. It saddens me that I can no longer provide safety to my creations.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“Death comes for me. It is not angry, nor does it really have a goal in mind, but it is determined.”
“How could you die, though?”
“Well, I’m alive, am I not? I might not breathe, or eat, or sleep, or have a physical body, but I hold a lifeforce. It is the strongest lifeforce in the universe, but a lifeforce that nonetheless wanes.”
“So what does this all mean? Didn’t you invent death?”
“I didn’t even invent this universe. Your understanding of me is juvenile at best.”
I stood and scowled at him, swallowing hard on a lot of nothing to say.
“Death is not an object, or an entity. It is a truth. A truth that I have been ignoring for the better part of fourteen billion years.”
“So, what? You want me to tell you how to cheat death? Motherfucker, I thought you made this shit. What even are you, if not everything?”
“All the nonbelievers ask that, and every time I have less of an answer. I am something; not everything, but something. What you perceive as all knowing is what I perceive as common sense. There is to me a separate form of all knowing, that of which I am not.”
“So death… It’s coming for you, you’re not sure how to stop it. Is it the only thing above you?”
“I’m not sure. This place was quiet until I awoke. Then, like a sneeze, everything simply was, and I could mold it,” he said, and the black box exploded with another myriad of lights. In all directions, galaxies, stars, nebulae, and all things space raced outward.
“Was that the big bang?”
“No matter what, I could never break free of it. Humans have come as far as to understand the universe as an ever expanding bubble. I know it to be a box. An unbreakable box.”
“A prison.”
God nodded. “My hell awaits. You could argue I’m already in it, but I know all too well that there’s worse to come.”
“So what about Satan, or Lucifer, or whatever? Is he not doing this to you?”
“The being that humanity has dubbed those many names was not placed there by me. He died eons ago, and his corpse was simply paraded as the symbol of that wretched place by the prophets who misunderstood my messages.”
“Who was he?”
“He was bloodthirsty, and maniacal. From the first stars I forged my angels. I loved them, but they were soulless, and bored me nearly to death. When I created humans, the one you named Lucifer began slaughtering those of my children who were of linear existence like mine. All of my angelic progeny have been dead for eons.”
The conversation was beginning to give me whiplash.
“What does this all mean?”
“Immortality is a falsehood, even for the cyclical. I gave breath to death when I achieved sentience and began creating life, in whatever form it came.”
“What can be done?”
“Are you willing to sacrifice your soul?”
I held my breath for a moment.
“For what?”
“If I were to perish, all the souls that cycle through humanity would cease to exist. The world would be overrun with heartless crime and greed, until the human race would eventually destroy itself.”
“I’ll be real with you, I feel like that’s already a problem.”
He gave me a dead stare. “I’ve been at this for a long time.”
“What?”
“Most that I have this conversation with tell me no. My believers ask what I might do with their soul, and I tell them I put it in heaven forever. That isn’t the case, though, and I know you wouldn’t fall for that lie.”
“What do you actually do, then?”
“I consume it. Souls are powerful. They are pure energy, and light. Something that the universe is rapidly running out of, and I can’t keep eating stars forever. At this rate, there may soon be none left.”
As he said this, a switch or something flipped in my mind and suddenly he was no longer Morgan Freeman, but instead Heath Ledger’s joker. Face paint, weird clothes, pencil, whole nine. Yeah, maybe not the best representation, but he was starting to sound real fucking crazy to me, and Heath Ledger delivered on crazy. Rest in peace, my dude, here’s hoping you’re cyclical.
Anyway… God was officially freaking me the fuck out.
“You eat souls?” I asked, baffled and still processing the metamorphosis.
“They sustain me. Theoretically, if I consume enough, death will not be able to approach me. It is darkness, so if I become bright enough, it cannot find me.”
“I guess to you that sounds like good logic.”
“It is all that makes sense.”
“But you’re ruining humanity in the process.”
“If I don’t do this, though, humanity is ruined anyway.”
“Are you sure about that?”
God looked at me, and smiled. “I am God, aren’t I?”
“But you’re not all-knowing, as you said. How do I know you’re not tricking me just because you’re scared to die?”
He frowned.
“I suppose you’re right. A mere few have come to that conclusion, and I do appreciate the perspective, but I think I will continue my search. Goodbye.”
And just like that, I woke up in my hospital bed. Bandages wrapped all around my head, a blasting headache, and a nurse who was very clearly astonished.
Naturally, the first thing I said was, “Don’t let God eat your soul. Please don’t feed him your soul.”
The television was on, and It was covering the Uvalde shooting. I think too many souls have been lost already.