You’re young, you have your life ahead of you; and that’s true, I did—not to mention the life to come, in which, well, my life would somehow be both ahead of me and perfectly in step with every decision I make. You’re great to think that – so what was she saying? Was she affirming my belief in the life to come—or, perhaps, to keep her happy, I should say a life to come? That way she might not feel like I’m saying she must necessarily also have a life to come—i don’t know why she would want that, but, if that was all she could believe in, then, i guess she didn’t have a choice. I think that’s the main point that some of us want to make—that we’re not free agents, that we don’t have a choice, and the life, this life, is nothing more than a dream that doesn’t involve the consciousness of the person that’s asleep.
I don’t know if Ursula believed in God, but, in saying that to myself, she said, indeed, that she does. Then it goes to follow, if you believe in God, that you also believe in heaven, or an afterlife that is more important than everything. God is the person doing the dreaming, and, when Jesus dreams, he dreams about God. That’s how it works. But I didn’t know if Ursula believed in an afterlife—some people would claim, I’m sure, that a belief in God does not entail life after death—but that would be because they don’t believe that God is a person—and, technically, everybody knows that when you say “God,” you at least want that to be a person that loves you. Not some overthought analysis that concludes that God is simply totality. But as soon as I posed the question, Ursula responded, quickly, that yes, she does believe in an afterlife. So what was i to do? Everything was just as I hoped it would be; but the question becomes: am i just telling myself what I want to hear? And my answer to that is going to sound a little vague: yes, I was telling myself what I wanted to hear, but, technically, i didn’t do that until Ursula told me so. How do I know I’m talking to Ursula? Well, if, by Ursula you mean the future president (in my view) of the United States, then, no, there was no way for me to know this—I just believed it. And, if, by Ursula, you mean someone I love in the afterlife (not necessarily the future president of the United States), then the answer is still, no, I have no way of knowing, but, again, I believe it, and, at my age, I have reasons to believe.
You go, girl, and what was that? She was making funof me; yes, i considered the possibility that I’m not attracted to men, as a man, because I’m actually a woman, and, if I transformed myself, and accepted that person, then I might, at some point, develop a crush on a man. But even at my most depraved levels of alcohol and cigarette abuse, i never wanted to be a woman more than a couple days a week—actually I wanted to be a woman every Thursday and every other Sunday, but I never thought of being completely a woman—I never wondered if I should have surgery. I liked being a man, even if it meant I was a gay man, and, furthermore, even if it meant that I wasn’t, i wanted, for the most part, to hold off on getting a vagina until i was in heaven and it was possible to transform without making any permanent decisions. My penis, basically, was very important to me; i wasn’t going to give it up.
“What are you doing here,” I asked. “I mean, what are you doing here, with me?” The answer I got? I’m half-baked. But what did she know about marijuana? I had no idea if she ever smoked it or not—and she wasn’t telling me anything yet—at least not suddenly, and then, well, she admitted to it; didn’t she? But she said, No, i didn’t. But I didn’t believe that because she worked in a restaurant and people that work in restaurants use drugs. But she said, alright, maybe a little and I wondered, “Did that have something to do with your break-up?” After all, her boyfriend, in the pictures I saw, had a beard, and, well, people with beards tend, at some point, to smoke marijuana. I never smoke daily; “how much?” honestly? I didn’t like it—it just made me self-conscious, as if I was out of place.
Now, is that true? Again, I don’t know. But i wasn’t talking to my voice—I was talking to Ursula’s voice, and, because I believed everybody had a voice with a unique frequency—i believed that I was speaking to Ursula. Sure, that might involve some spooky action at a distance—this idea that I can use an extra-dimension to react to a partner across vast distances—faster than the speed of light, instantaneously, in fact, but yeah: I wasn’t using my voice or the voice of my internal narrator; i was using Ursula’s unique physical address. That made it intuitive for me: everything she told me was true—as long as I didn’t ruin it by saying something out loud, in some unprotected space, where outsiders might nip something in the bud—or change the course of future events. When, then, did something actually happen? As it was taking shape, in our minds, or as it was revealed to those that could say, with certainty, that they physically experienced an event?