[ WP ] You just died . You find out that all versions of the afterlife actually do exist , for every religion ever imagined . Everyone goes to the `` heaven '' that corresponds to their beliefs . Problem is , you are an atheist .

The light in the room finally shaded obscure, an enveloping glow of golden grey that blotted out all - fading the touch of my daughter's hands, wiping away the smell of home, quieting the laughter of children yet pealing in the windows from the playground, over the silence - then disappeared the very sense of sensation, the concept of hearing, and the labor of life. 
 
 For a long time, there was nothing, not even time itself. There passed an eternity but also only an instant. For the universe pays no heed to either, neither to the minutest mite nor the greatest galaxy. Both are as large as a downy hair and small as an elephant's leg. 
 
 I am the sun and the stars, and the wind and the waves. I am the crawling of a caterpillar and the enormity of an earthquake. I am every drop of rain that from the sea rises, blows, falls, and winds its way a thousand leagues to rejoin the waters from whence it wafted. I am everywhere, and nowhere. 
 
 You are - I was - a small flame, the spark of a lightning bug, a thing that stays within itself and can shelter its whole comfortably under the boughs of an oak, a pattern that speaks to itself second by minute, that fancies itself the same thing across the sunrises and moons and seasons ( but is n't ), until it flickers away. 
 
 But it is not gone. The shape and the happening, that is I me you - it scatters and slows to join the sands of time. Its breath mingles with breezes and the storms, and shapes them at a touch more than a sculptor ever could a slab of stone, for in a year a gust will blow just a moment later, and in a handful more will hang a cloud where there was none, and in a handful of handfuls a storm stilled, or raging to tear down the forests, and from then on, who can know? 
 
 The universe knows. It has all the words that have and shall be spoken, and an ocean more besides. It has mountains of minutia, piling up besides bedrock boulders of immutable fact, of law that all the air in a room may not at once rush into the closet, that time inches forwards and creatures and sprouts drift over the aeons into altogether different forms. Or maybe these are the particles of sand, and the whims of a butterfly the boulders, for the universe loves all its happenings the same, much as there is a place in one's heart for the errant mole as there is for eyesight and legs. 
 
 I am the embrace of loving hands, I am the aroma of stove and books on shelf. I am the children at play, and the play of the children. I am the squealing swings and the giggling at games, and I am the squealing of the swings and the giggling game. I am life, and the light. 
 
 I am dead, and shall live forever.
