I hope to God that there is a heaven and a hell.

A strange request, I know, for I might go to the fiery burning kingdom for my sins, but if there was none then all of us would float forever in a grey, clinical limbo. I wonder sometimes, in the queer place between sleeping and waking, if limbo is more of a hell then the actual hell beneath the soles of our nailed shoes and if it would suffocate those already dead and gone. A horrid penance - to float, forever stammering your apologizes to the wind, mute and erased, limp and broken.

There is no chance for redemption there, but simply the emptiness of an empty house or a church in the middle of the night.

It is the scariest projection a person can make. To be nothing is almost as heartbreakingly terrifying as the thought that all of us are a actually and physically nothing.

The atoms of our being hum close together to form ourselves, but between them, the molecules that hold us together, is nothing. We manage to curse ourselves into being nothing and everything at the same time.

Perhaps, I think, perhaps we are all in limbo right now and none of us know it. Mayhaps, perhaps this is our own hell and each of us has our own invisible crime records marked up red and big on our shriveled souls. All of us inmates, criminals, serving our punishments together. All of us to love and learn, to know that Death comes and smothers all the good out of all the good people who have only ever been good and good and good. Some people are murdered in their beds, a mangled crimson over the white sheets, and some fall down the twisting rabbit holes. We are all weak. We are all vulnerable and utterly lost. None of us are better criminals than others, but some are better at crafting the words that protrude from their lips. Liars and manipulators that are just as evil as the man who puts a knife to a young girl's throat or the older woman who shoots her husband leaning over the paper.

So I say, let us serve our time and hope, desperately hope, that when our sentence is over we go somewhere else. Simply to escape the numbing limbo.