The choir doesn’t sound like music anymore. After a hundred million years, it just sounds like a dry, annoying scrape inside your head, like bugs crawling in a desert that never gets dark. When you were alive, you remember kneeling on hard wood floors, crying and begging God to save you from fire. You memorized the holy books, lived a good life, and prayed to get into heaven, and prayed to get into heaven. No one ever warned you what “forever” actually meant. They used big words like “glory,” but they never gave you the math. One decillion years. That is 1 followed by 33 zeros. It is a number so huge that every single star in the universe died and turned to dust long before you even made it halfway through the timeline. Entire universes could have been born and died a trillion times while you stood here on this sea of glass.
Then comes the worst realization. After one decillion years, you aren’t even one percent closer to the end. If eternity is an infinite ocean, one decillion years isn’t even a single drop of water. It is nothing. There is no end. There is no time to rest. There is no night. The light is everywhere, blinding and unmoving. There are no shadows in heaven, which means there is no peace. Just the endless, painful white of God’s brightness. In the beginning, back when you still had a name and remembered what grass felt like–you tried to keep busy. You talked to every soul you could find. You counted every jewel in the walls. You replayed your human life a billion times until the faces of your family blurred into noise and vanished.
Then your brain started to break down. A human brain is only meant to last for seventy or eighty years. It needs to sleep, forget, and rest. Here, there is no sleep. Without rest, the mind melts. Your brain feels like warm mush. The part of you that felt sadness, curiosity, sadness, and love have been sanded away by the endless light. Your memories are gone. The person you were is gone. All that is left is a drone. You look around at the millions of people standing near the throne. They aren’t really people anymore. They are like wind up toys, repeating the same word over and over: Holy, holy, holy.
Their eyes wide and glassy. They don’t look at each other. They don’t think. You feel that same numbness creeping into your limbs. You are turning into one of them Panic hits you– a tiny spark of the person you used to be. You want to fight it. Be angry, you tell yourself. Be mad at God. You try to feel hatred. You look up at the blinding center of the light and try to feel some anger. Nothing happens. Your emotions are dead.
Then cry, you beg yourself. Just leave a single tear on the glass to prove you were once human. You squeeze your eyes shut, trying to force a single drop of water from your dry eyes. Nothing comes. There are no tears in Heaven. The old books promised God would wipe them away, and He did. He took the ability to feel anything at all. Your eyes open wide again. Your mouth starts to move on its own. The rhythm of Heaven takes control of your jaw. “Holy,” your mouth rasps out joining the trillion-voiced choir of the hollow dead. You drop to your knees on the glass. The light shines right through you. One decillion years down. Zero percent finished. Holy, holy.
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