None of it made any sense.

I would’ve thought some archaic gondola would’ve been the vehicle to bring me to the afterlife. After all, many ancient cultures figured it’d be at least a boat of some sort. But no, it wasn’t that at all.

Instead, I stood in a giant wicker basket. A warm, strong wind rocked me as if I was in a baby carriage. Above me, checkered spectral squares spun and spiraled upward to form a massive hot-air balloon that drifted steadfast toward the sun.

I knew the balloon well. I knew the different colors of the rainbow swirl within its pattern, the light wood that comprised the wicker. I remembered it better than I remembered the house I called home in my thirties, or my sixties. It hung over my childhood bed in a thin black plastic frame. My mother had cut it from the cover of a phone book and thought it would help me have good dreams. And it was that balloon that took me to somewhere else.

None of it made any sense.

Below me was not a serene cloudscape with rainbows arching from cumulus to nimbus. Instead it drifted over an ever-shifting roadscape, and each path below was one I had taken. The dirt path that cut through oaken woods when I was a child. The highway I groaned to take for my morning commute. The uphill road I took to the mountainside cemetery where my father was buried. It continued to shift by the moment. Some roads made me smile. Some roads made my stomach turn.

There were tricycles and hearses and ambulances and pick-up trucks. Then the paths gave way to buildings in which I spent time in, only the roofs were gone and I could peer right in. Hospitals and houses, churches and classrooms. After a while, the places were speeding by, or perhaps it was I that was going so fast, that I could only see a blur of light below me. But my heart was keeping up. I felt the pitfalls and the escalations. The rises and the falls. The swelling and the breaks.

None of it made any sense.

I would’ve thought that the one to bring me to the other side would’ve been an angel. Or, at the very least, a black cloaked skeleton wielding a crooked scythe. It wasn’t either of those, it wasn’t even my father, who would’ve certainly made it an awkward hot-air balloon ride indeed.

Yet instead, the pilot of the balloon was a standing, ever-shifting mass. There were dogs and cats and friends and foes and all of them, every one of the beings that my life collided with. It went from Charizard, the chameleon I accidentally crushed when I was a child, to the first girl to break my heart. There was the one guy I cut off when I was late for work. There was my wife. There was the friend that I betrayed.

Then it landed on a man in particular that made me keel over with sorrow. He had a beard now. When I saw him last, he was clean-shaven. He had wrinkles under his eyes. A beer gut now jutted out. He smiled and nodded.

“I thought I would’ve had more time to patch things up with him,” I said, my voice cracked with pain.

“He’s saying the same thing right now,” the figure before me said. “He’s saying it to your grandson. You never met him. But you will someday.”

The figure then shifted to more people. More lives I had the chance to impact. Whether I did or didn’t, I was only beginning to find out.

It didn’t make any sense.

Above us, the clear blue sky was beginning to form clouds. Yet the clouds weren’t white, they were patches of star-dusted space. Soon enough, the sky of Earth faded to the celestial cosmos. The balloon became bathed in light.

And still, the figure was still going through all the people.

“It was so much,” I said. “It was all just so much.”

“Nah,” the voice said. “It was a quick trip. They’re all quick trips. So, so quick. You can’t blink or you’ll miss it.”