I died with my shoes off. I woke up just the same. As I followed my caseworker through the long hallway, feeling the plush turquoise shag carpet under my feet, I knew this had to be hell.
It wasn’t a surprise.
I think part of me always knew I’d end up here someday.
I was never a spiritual man, but my mom was a devout Catholic. In my experience, a person can never quite escape the effects of such an upbringing. No matter how many times I called myself an atheist, in my most desperate moments, I still turned to God, at least within the quiet confines of my own mind.
Mom went just a few years before I did, and in the months following, I silently prayed to a god I didn’t believe in. Most of my life I hoped I was right to believe there was no such thing as an afterlife, as a soul.
I knew if there was, I didn’t stand a chance.
But then she was gone, and I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine a world where shewasn’t.
So I prayed.
Not for anything in particular, I just… prayed and hoped someone somewhere could hear me.
It wasn’t the first time I’d done that. In fact, the first time I remember praying just for the existence ofsomethingafter death was over twenty years earlier.
Josephina Vasquez died on November 6, 2026. I learned about her death the following day, via an Instagram story, of all things. No one thought to call and tell me directly. Of course they wouldn’t. As far as anyone else knew, we were casual acquaintances at most. The truth was a secret kept between the two of us.
On November 7, that secret was mine and mine alone.
Ellie cried the hardest at her funeral, his sobs loud and dramatic in a way my bitter mind wanted to call performative. I helped him compose himself, and we walked up to Joey’s family and offered our condolences. It felt strange speaking trite, empty words to these people I’d never met, people who were in the throes of a grief so deep I couldn’t even imagine. Speaking to them made me even more resentful of Ellie’s open, unapologetically visible sorrow. Joey’s family was more stoic; her sister’s and father’s eyes were rimmed with red, but they managed to hold themselves together.
Idly standing there, watching as Joey’s family wrapped Ellie in their arms, I felt truly jealous of him for the first time. He was welcome here in a way I never would be; they knew him. Something he said to Joey’s father pushed him over the edge, and he started openly crying, which made Ellie’s sobs begin anew. I found myself watching Joey’s mother, who had yet to shed a tear, as she rubbed circles on her husband’s back.
That night, I held Ellie as he drunkenly confessed that he blamed himself for her death.
“I just let her leave without checking if she was good to drive. She was always so careful, you know? She—she seemed invincible,” he managed to gasp out between sobs.
I could have absolved him of his guilt. If it was anyone’s fault, it was my own. After all, wasn’t I the one who had antagonized her into leaving? Wasn’t I the one who had watched her chug a glass of wine minutes before she got in her car?
I said nothing.
In the past couple of years, he had become my best friend. Maybe my only friend. But Joey had been kind of right when she accused me of hating him.
I let Ellie blame himself, and I held my guilt inside, keeping the truth between myself and Joey. Another secret for the two of us, the second one that now belonged only to me.
The following month was one of the low points of my life—and despite my massively publicized success, my life was not without its fair share of low points.
It took me longer than I’d care to admit to unpack why that was.
On the one hand, before the night of her death, I had not seen Joey in seven years. We weren’t friends. We never really had been—I’d never had many friends to speak of. By the time Joey died, we were the opposite of friends. I knew, without a shred of doubt, that if someone had asked her if she hated me, she would have said yes.
On the other hand, I knew that I was partly to blame for her death. If I hadn’t antagonized her, she wouldn’t have left so early. If I had antagonized her a little bit more and for the right reasons, she might have taken my advice and ordered an Uber.
I antagonized her too much and yet not enough, and so she died.
I don’t remember the first time I saw Joey. I do remember that we were in one of the same business classes. One day, the professor called on her to answer what I—and, from the looks on the other students’ faces, mostof my classmates—thought was an impossible-to-answer question. She responded so eloquently and succinctly that I couldn’t help but perk up every time he called on her after that. I found her riveting.
We didn’t officially meet until the next semester. We were introduced by Ellie and Cat at a party. By that point, I was dating a girl named Rachel. I’m not ashamed to admit that I would have dropped Rachel in a heartbeat had I caught even the slightest hint of interest from Joey.
Needless to say, I didn’t.
Life moved forward. Rachel and I broke up. I would have tried asking Joey out, but it was painfully obvious that she was in love with Ellie. So I moved on. We graduated and began stumbling our way through adult life.
I met and married Ingrid in quick succession, which was a mistake. Ellie married Cat. I received an invite to the wedding.
