When you think about purgatory you might imagine a waiting room. In my head it was always like the doctors, nice but very plain. White walls, uncomfortable chairs and maybe a stack of magazines. Purgatory isn’t supposed to be fun, right. You wait there, presumably bored out of your skull, until someone above or below, decides to accept you. I think I was expecting the same feeling as when I got my high school results that decided what college I was going to end up at.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Turns out only the very best get to heaven and the very worst go to hell. Literally everyone else is stuck here. Apart from the ghost crew, but I don’t want to get into the complexities of those guys right now.

Purgatory is a lot like being lower middle class on earth. It’s nice enough, you’re doing OK, but it’s never quite what you wanted for yourself. Sure things could be a lot worse and you’re grateful for what you’ve got. But like, is this all there is?

It was fourteen years ago that I died. A tragic car crash, not my fault. I was coming back late at night after a long weekend fishing. The drunk driver who’s fault it was? He’s here too. Turns out he was basically a good guy, but he was drunk driving, so he can’t expect to see the pearly gates anytime soon. Equally it seems one bad mistake doesn’t write you off entirely and send you down to the basement either. He’s made peace with that I think, he’s a lifer, a term people here use to describe the residents who are going to be here for eternity. The irony of the term is not lost on us, believe me. Even the Americans understand irony in purgatory it seems. The afterlife gives you some real perspective.

Anyway, my chances are quite good I think. I wasn’t a saint, I didn’t do much that was that good, I just lived my life. I haven’t got any black marks against my name either though. Judging by the current rate if I’m lucky I’ll be here for a few decades. Then I might get the chance to see heaven.

There’s a queue, you see. Heaven got filled up back around the time of the First World War. Ever since then it’s been one in one out. You don’t stay forever in heaven either. There’s this new initiative, they train people up to be better, then reincarnate them back into the world to be even better than before. I guess the objective is to make the world a better place. So us lot in purgatory, we just gotta wait our turn.

Of course with the people who already got into heaven once being almost saints it means they’re much more likely to fast track straight to the penthouse again when they do die. So there’s that to deal with. But hey, it’s not like any of us are going anywhere in the meantime.

If I had to give purgatory a rating I’d say 3.5 stars. Pretty ok, better than I’d expected even, but nothing to write home about. Not that I can write home at all anymore.