was not expecting a deep and abiding belief in the eternal kingdom of Heaven to grip me at 3:42 a.m. but it did.

I am a staunch atheist most days if I limit myself to what I think I personally deserve or can expect for myself.

A stopping of lungs or heart, a fade to black, hopefully soft. I think I deserve only what seems possible from the limits of what we know, even if I live well.

What turns me every time into a raving evangelist who firmly and truly believes in a Heaven beyond the preacher's purple prose, open and assured to all living creatures, is when I let my thoughts circle around what my friends deserve, after all this.

Like trans kids deserve a conversation with their mortally-dipshit parents where they're finally gonna apologize, having seen every step of the journey their kid went through as surely as if they took it themselves, but no one needs to apologize cuz everyone somehow just Knows

Kids who've been hungry deserve all the meals they missed, and a chance to do something lovely and kind with all that energy they had to spend on worry.

Kids who had that anxiety voice all their life, picking and hammering at them, deserve to hear the rest of the emotional symphony.

Kids of color deserve a day a week a year a lifetime where they're not quantified, tagged, pathologized, explained, competing, second-guessed and second-guessing. Deserve to see what happens when all that energy can go somewhere else than surviving and apologizing.

and like do not get it twisted, it is my responsibility while I live here to grab as many pieces of that Heaven as I can fit in my own two fists and make them manifest here now on Earth. Dreaming of Heaven must not dull the urgency of tending to the now for friends and strangers.

but there better BE a heaven is what I'm saying.

and when i think of how good lots of the people i know are, and what that goodness deserves, and how much rest they'll need -- I start to believe it, in spite of all silence and evidence to the contrary and dead dial tone.