In heaven there are no circles, only a single house. A huge bright house on the beach, with a clean white kitchen and softly worn towels and a glass bowl of shells by the door. A small stone house at the end of a long drive through the woods, nestled among snowdrifts and smelling of hot apple cider. A wide dense house on the top of a hill, where the clouds and sky melt into the quiet acres.
In this house is a deep kitchen with strings of garlic and onions hanging from the rafters, and the wind blows outside but you stay warm and fragrant as you add the wine to deglaze the pan and as your grandmother sifts flour and sugar together next to you at the counter. In this house a breeze blows in the open afternoon windows and you fall quickly and gently asleep on the library floor, cuddled on a thick carpet with a stack of all the books you lost in the hurricane. Downstairs in this house there is a huge underground pool and you can hear the music and see the lantern lights scintillating through the churning waves as everyone jumps in, screaming and laughing and throwing things, happy to see you and ready to do underwater handstands.
There is the work you were born to do, in this house, if you hadn’t had student loans to pay off at eight percent interest and if that one agent had got back to you and if you hadn’t been so scared. There’s the use of every part of your mind and body and there is the calm you knew you needed but with which you could never manage to fill your interior. There are the thoughts you didn’t have time to think and the conversations it never occurred to you to have. This house is full of time and peace and you have enough of both, you can hold enough like dusky cherries fresh off the tree.
Every day, in this house, you learn that you were more loved than you ever knew, that you are more loved than you’ll ever know. “I never forgot you and never stopped thinking about you,” he says, his face bright in the morning. “You saved me that one time and I saved someone else because of you,” she says underneath the stars on the lawn. “I am so proud of you,” she says. “I always looked forward to our talks,” he says. You can use the past or the present tense, you can speak of the future with everyone you thought would only be with you for a short fraught moment. You can sit silent and glowing with people whose words overwhelmed and flattened you, shrunk you daily and weekly.
Most importantly, in this house you find the ability and the opportunity to talk about the love you’ve had for everyone who would not hear you before you ended up in heaven all together. You forget shame and advantage and worry and you let it all spill out, finally, continually, because they are all there, they’re playing croquet in the back yard or letting their voice rise to the treetops or jumping on the trampoline or coming around the corner with a cup of tea, followed by a dog. Your body when you were eighteen is the most beautiful thing I ever saw, you say, unless it was your body at thirty or your body at seventy-five. I never knew anyone so generous, you say. You lived in my heart my whole life, you say, and I visited you there every day.
The sun shines in this house, the snow falls, the birds cry fierce on the lake. You walk inside and shake your shoes off, stretch your arms above your head, breathe in and out in this house, this always and forever house.