Getting Home

Part Twenty-Three

I opened my eyes.

And saw.

Henry's face.

I was lying on something soft—unnaturally soft. The ground? Grass? Green? A bed? I couldn't tell, everything was so blurry...

Except for Henry's glorious, handsome, concerned face above me, filling my vision.

He broke into a beautiful smile of relief when our eyes connected.

"Ava," he whispered.

"Hi," I said softly, reaching up to slowly stroke my hand down the side of his perfect face. "I missed you."

He put his hand under my back, delicately helping me sit up. I was immediately dizzy—beyond dizzy. Everything felt so...weird. Disorienting. Bright, bleary, fuzzy... maybe... green?

Daytime?

So hard to focus.

"What happened?" I said, putting my hand to my head, trying to stop the dizziness, to grasp the disorientation. "Henry, where—"

My eyes suddenly adjusted, coming into sharp focus, allowing me to see everything...

Which was—

Nothing.

Literally nothing.

Except green.

Fields of it—vast, rolling plains of deep, emerald-green landscape that stretched out for eternity, in every direction, as far as I could see. The sky above us was glowing aquamarine, saturated and vibrantly layered in a deep sparkling blue that radiated to eternity.

I'd never seen anything like it.

"Henry," I whispered in awe. "What is this place?"

He wasn't looking at me—I could only see the side of his face, but I caught a slow, sparkling reflection silently trailing down his cheek.

"Home," he said simply. "It's home."

Home? I looked out at the massive infinite plains of shimmering fields and endless ocean-blue sky.

Could this really be his home? I mean, I'm dead, right?

Have to be.

But Henry was in my afterlife?

Okay, so after all that other nonsense, THIS is what you can't buy?

Henry helped me up. The ground was amazingly soft underneath my bare feet—like stepping on a cloud of soft satin. The air itself was brisk, cool and crisp, making every breath pure and clear and clean and...

Refreshing.

But everything besides that??

The surrounding ocean of green, uniform nothingness going on for infinity was too eerie, too surreal—too unreal. I started to get a really weird feeling...

Like detached.

I don't know. I really don't. All that mattered was it felt real to me, no matter what my rational mind tried to scream at me.

Am I on a different planet? I don't understand ANY of this.

It was like viewing myself from the outside. I couldn't anchor myself, there was nothing in the environment to see, nothing to latch onto, my mind beginning to spin and pieces flying off of it, nothing to focus on or grasp onto, nothing to—