The Last Thing God Said

And then everything was light. L’étage, le ciel, les….murs? Were these walls? She didn’t know. It was like she was trapped in an ethereal world where nothing existed but light and her. How did she get here? Why was she here? Where was everyone? Is there food? Elle a faim, mais la lumière n’a pas les calories. So many thoughts crossed her mind, a dizziness setting in.

“Welcome, Sabrina.” A calm but firm voice echoed around her. Sabrina spun around in shock, fear, and desperation. “Hey! Who is that?! Where am I?!” Frantically looking around, the world remained light, population of one.

Then God appeared. Not suddenly, in fact; more like a slow fuse into reality. A 4D object entering a 3D world, it was very confusing until it wasn’t. Normally, Sabrina would have been terrified, but her desperation for answers outweighed her fear of the unknown.

God looked just like her but completely different. There were no features. No eyes, mouth, nose, freckles. No genitals but the voice was deep and firm—masculine, kind of reminding her of an ex-lover. The body was Human, the representation though was alien. And somehow it felt like home.

“…what the fuck are you? Tabarnak” Sabrina blurted out, immediately regretting taking a hostile tone but, to be honest, she couldn’t help it. She was who she was.

The figure pulsed, reverberating and refracting rays of light outlining His body, “Relax Sabrina, you’re safe. You’re home now.”

Sabrina felt this intense wave of emotional energy overwhelm her. It felt good. Like a warm hug, but on many different planes of her being. This didn’t distract her for long, though. “You didn’t answer my question. T’es qui? T’es quoi? Je suis où?”

“I am God, and you’re in what you might have known as Heaven. Ça fait du sens?” The figure had no features but Sabrina felt it staring at her—somehow, she also knew that God was smirking.

“Hold on, I’m dead? Comment?” Sabrina was starting to feel the shock of the moment, but for some reason, no panic attack took place. It was at this moment that she realized her old habits had no effect here. The old behaviors and patterns she previously fell into had no bearing in this world. She liked it but was also confused by it. If she wasn’t that Sabrina, then who is this Sabrina? She looked at the figure for answers.

“Does it matter? Tu es là maintenant. On a beaucoup des choses à revoir.”

Sabrina took a step back, like she was about to run away (she had no clue where she could even run to), “Woah. Hold on. Am I dreaming? I need to wake up. This is far too surreal for me.” She tried her old trick of slamming her head against something—she chose the ground because, well, that’s all there was—and found that, not only was there no physical sensation of pain, she was not waking up. Either she was in a deep lucid dream, a flagrant hallucination, or she really was dead. For some minutes, the figure watched as Sabrina crawled around and hit her head as hard as she could on the floor—a spectacular sight for any being, especially the Divine.

“As funny as it is to watch you like this, you should stop. Je te dis la vérité. Come, let’s walk a while.”

The figure began to move away, and Sabrina watched it. In this white world, it both looked like it was getting farther and farther, while at the same time, remaining motionless. A paradoxical philosophy for Sabrina to contemplate: to stay in comfort or move forward into growth?

No thought crossed her mind. She needed answers and began to run after God.

They had been walking for a while, Sabrina pouring out her soul. Everything from childhood and her family to the little bitch at one workplace that she still hated. “Honestly, fuck her,” Sabrina said. A wave of realization took over in the moment after her last syllable was uttered that she had been speaking for an unknown duration of time, and most important to her, that God hadn’t said a thing.

She swerved the conversation to try and break the silence. “So…where are we going?”

“Nowhere in particular. It’s just nice to hear you talk again.”

Sabrina stopped. “Again? What do you mean again? I’ve been here before?”

God turned around to face her, even though there was no face to address, “Oh yes. Technically, you’re from here. This is where your soul was created before it inhabited the Human corpus. Your natural talents, beliefs, and quirks were all chosen here.”

Somehow, this was not news. Something in her already knew this. It felt like an old friend repeating a story you’ve heard a million times but still makes you laugh. A note of familiarity washed over her, then became shrouded by intrigue.

“I’ve always wanted to ask you: why did you make me the way I was? There were certain parts of me I always tried to change and couldn’t. I just accepted that it was how I was, and it was irreversible. Please, explain your thinking.”

The world shimmered, it seemed, a ripple running through the fabric of whatever reality Sabrina was experiencing. “Woah…what was that?”

“Sabrine,” Dieu dit, “I didn’t choose anything. All those quirks and innate traits you described were chosen by you, ton âme, during your time here. It was all purposeful, designed to guide your Life in specific ways so that your Human could learn and grow accordingly. Every struggle, special realization, lost opportunity, achievement, and lesson was carefully crafted by you, here. That’s what this place is for: la creation de votre experience de vie.”

Nothing was said for a long time. For what could Sabrina say to this? There was no respectable or appropriate refutation she could give, no argumentation she could muster. She seriously chose her entire life? The bully in third grade. The cheater she only found out about the night before prom. Les cinq expériences de mort imminente qu’elle a vécues avant ses 30 ans. Being the highest-paid woman in her province, only to resign two weeks later because she suddenly became bored. All of this was just…too much for one person to consider. She felt betrayed, but in the weirdest way because it was apparently herself that did the damage. For years, decades even, she had cursed the cosmos for dealing her (what she thought was) a shitty hand. And now to be told that it was really her who was not only dealing the cards but carefully picking them. Too much indeed. “I’m not entirely sure what to say right now.”

“Tu ne l’es jamais.”

“This feels like an atomic bomb was dropped right on top of me. How do you expect me to understand all of this so quickly? It’s like realizing your entire life was a dream.”

A warm energy engulfed her, like a warm hug from the heavens. She felt comforted.

“When your species first sailed beyond the known world, they believed the horizon was the edge, that they’d fall off the Earth itself. But some explorers surrendered to that fear and sailed anyway. They discovered the horizon kept extending, that new lands waited beyond what they’d thought was the end. What you’re experiencing now is similar. The life you lived in your human body, that horizon you thought was the edge of everything, was just one part of something much wider, much deeper. Now you’ve sailed past it, so everything feels brand-new, unprecedented, uncomfortable.”

“That doesn’t make this experience any less devastating and difficult to deal with,” Sabrina glared at God. “Alors, I’m from here, and chose to give myself a shitty life, and now I’m told that this is just a natural part of all human life and that I shouldn’t be surprised at it? Great, thanks. Real helpful.”

“Why do you refer to your life as ‘shitty?’”

“Tu es Dieu, non? You are supposed to know everything already. Weren’t you there all the times I was getting cheated on, or abused, or taken advantage of, or stalked, or lied to, or betrayed? That’s your world that spawned from your existence and your universe, is it not? Oh, right, I forgot. I was the one that chose all those things to happen. Which makes me think, if I was the one who chose this life, and the one who lived it, what the fuck do you do? What’s your role in all of this?”

Dieu ne dit rien. There was no movement or energy transfer. No ripple through reality. Juste du silence. Pas la paix. There was a hanging tension between them. Sabrina felt it—the anger, the frustration, the rage. She felt it not like a human did, with neurochemicals flooding synapses and tightening muscles, but as something outside her. No racing heart to anchor the fury or clenched jaw to prove it real. The emotions pressed against her from all directions, dense and material, but she wasn’t in them. She was simply aware of them.

She was the one to break the silence. “See? Nothing. Not even God can answer the simplest question. Because there is no good answer, is there? Let’s face it, I’m either hallucinating, or in a coma, or hooked up to a weird simulation and this is all a test. Eh bien, ça ne marche pas. Whatever this is, whatever you are, can fuck right off. I’ve played your little game, and I am done.”

“That’s what you said last time, too,” God said.

“Tu m’as dit quoi?”

“Last time you were here, in your previous life, you said the same thing. Almost in the same way, but you spoke Chinese instead. You also took way longer to understand this place and what we’re doing here. You’ve made great progress!”

This reaction was not at all what she was expecting. Some type of fight or argumentation or pushback was what she had anticipated…or wanted in some weird way. A realization occurred that God did not work in the way she had predicted. Duh. She felt stupid to even consider this. Of course, the Divine wouldn’t operate on her logic—on Human logic. The rules she’d spent a lifetime internalizing, the patterns of conflict and resolution that governed every relationship she’d ever had, they didn’t apply here. There was no winning an argument with God because there was no argument to win.

For the first time—was it the first?—she realized that God was not against her. En réalité, Dieu ne constituait pas du tout une partie distincte d’elle. They weren’t two entities in conversation, one mortal, one divine, but intricate parts of the same whole. Neither complete without the other, neither reducible to the other. Her anger at God had been anger at herself, and God’s patience with her had been her own capacity for self-forgiveness, waiting to be recognized. The boundary she’d assumed existed between them was just another horizon she’d built and mistaken for the edge of the world.

“Exactly, Sabrina. Now you understand. Without you, I don’t exist. Not in the way you’ve been thinking about existence. There’s just you, and me. You are the focal point of my existence—just you, in this universe. Not because you’re special in some cosmic hierarchy, but because in this moment, in this experience, you are all there is. Every other soul, every other life—they have their own moment like this, their own universe where they are the center. But right now? This is yours. And mine. We share it. Every time you experience something, every time you choose a particular path, you are doing it for yourself and for me. When you loved, I learned love. When you suffered, I understood suffering. When you acted with cruelty or kindness, with courage or fear—I felt the weight of those choices because they weren’t just yours. They were mine too. We are the universe experiencing itself, but not in some distant, abstract way. When you ask what I do, what my role is—I witness, participate, become, through you.”

Sabrina looked at the ground. Not in defeat, but in acceptance. “Qu’est-ce que je fais maintenant?”

“Every soul you incarnate into, all the energy you put out into the universe, it all has a purpose. We are the Creator, experiencing the universe of energy we have pushed out. Once we have reclaimed it all, the cycle begins anew. You will be born again. Into a different time, a different place, a different Human. To experience the beauty and the suffering of Humanity once again. For you, and for us.”

That was the last thing God said as Sabrina felt her body dissolving, a painless transcendence into something else, something more, something greater. The walls, the sky, the floors faded away into blackness.

Et puis tout devint lumière.