Paradise+Found+(aka+Dante+Project)

Our story begins in a large room, bare except for a room. As I could see no other entrance or exit, I assumed that that was the way I came and, as there was no way to press on, I should turn back. As I reached for the handle, I heard a voice, small and gentle. I glanced around the room, but as I was still alone (or so I thought) and passed it off as me hearing things again. I opened the door to be greeted by what felt like a punch to the gut. The air was knocked out of me, and I felt myself be dragged through the passage way. I came to in another room, much like the first, yet bright, though there was no source of light. I saw a figure loom over me, and I felt a great surge of happiness and sorrow at the sight of this figure. It was my mother. I wept for a while; she wept beside me. My mind raced to think of a rational explanation for this turn of events. //Was she alive? Was I dead? Could this be a dream?// //Yeah, that seems logical.// I thought of ways that I could test this hypothesis. I pressed my figure into the palm of my hand and I counted the number of fingers I and my mother had. These tests resulted in no abnormalities, but I still thought that I was dreaming, even if I couldn’t go lucid. I finally found myself able to speak. “Where… Where are we?” “You’re in Heaven.” My face changed to one of pure horror. “Oh, you’re not dead; He just felt that you should be given a tour of what could await you in the afterlife.” She stood and helped me up, and we walked the length of the room, and we spoke of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings. We reached the door on the far side of the room and entered. This room was bare and bright enough that you could see clearly, not that it would make a difference as the dead appear blurry to the eyes of the living. The dead in this room seemed to be playing in a band. As the finished up a quick jam session, I approached who I assumed to be the leader of the band and tried to strike up conversation with him. We hadn’t been talking for thirty seconds when I realized I was speaking to John Lennon. He gave me a quick summary of his life, not even touching on his childhood and began with the formation of the Beatles in ’57 and going beyond his disbanding of the Beatles in ’69 to his murder in 1980. When he finished I asked him what the moral of his story was, and he replied, “Don’t be a good person for God. Be a good person because you want to be.” My mother showed me to the next door, this one leading to an elevator. As we rode up, I could faintly hear some of the Beatles’ songs in the background. We reached our next destination, a dimmer, yet more welcoming room, filled with desks, paper, ink, and typewriters, anything a writer would or could ever wish for. I wondered the room, stopping occasionally to gaze over the shoulders of the dead residing there. As I made it to the far side of the room, I looked at some of the works on one of the desks, and saw that it was J.R.R. Tolkien’s desk. I began to read one of his unfinished works, but Tolkien himself appeared behind me. I apologized profusely for reading his work, and he just said, in good old, cryptic Tolkien fashion, “A writer writes so that a reader can read.” He spoke mostly of his inspirations for his works, including the stories of the spider that bit him as a child, a couplet he read in Oxford, and his time at war in Afghanistan. He touched on the writing of his books, but I knew most of the story behind them, so he just briefly ran over the back stories. Eventually I had to leave, so I went to the next elevator. On the way up, I could faintly here what I always thought the songs in //The Hobbit// and //The Lord of the Rings// would sound like. We reached the final landing, and my mother said that she could not go any farther. We said our goodbyes and I ventured forth into the room. It looked like some sort of corporate office of some sort. I saw a man behind a desk working diligently. I recognized his face immediately. It was Abraham Lincoln. Abe told me to take a seat. As I waited to have a chat with my favorite president, I glanced around the room, catching sight of the door, which stated, though backwards, “Abraham Lincoln, President of the Laws of Nature.” “That’s a pretty heavy job you got there,” I said, in response to the door. “Heavy?” Abe replied. “Are things on Earth too heavy these days?” I chuckled at the reference to //Back to the Future,// though I was unsure if Abe knew he was making a reference. We talked for a bit, though mostly on the strains he experienced during the Civil War. As our conversation came to an end, I asked him if he wanted to govern the Laws of Nature, and he just smiled and said, “Would you turn down an offer made to you by God?” As I got up to leave, Abe motioned to a door beside him. “This elevator will get you home.” I went inside, pressed the button, and waited. A presidential fanfare played in the background as the elevator moved down. The doors opened, and I found myself just outside. I turned around to see the elevator doors closing in the middle of my driveway. I open my mouth in protest to this blatant rift in reality, but instead just settled for shaking my fists at the sky and yelling, “ABE!”