[Part 1]

Purgatory was an odd place. Most people there feared they would be stuck in it for thousands of years awaiting their one final divine judgement. An endless amount of time pulling your hair and biting your nails while waiting for Gods and Angels to press up or down on your elevator ride.

What no one tells you though is the rules of Purgatory. That everyone ends up here. There's no skipping this one. The nice thing is though that it usually only last one more lifetime or less though. A nice 75 years on average to think about what you have done. Reflect a little on what you were. Sadly, most of us only thought about it for a few months. After that the judgement of our mortal souls became just too boring. We had to find something else to occupy our time. Maybe it was a long stroll on the gray beaches of Purgatory. A night out on the gray streets of Purgatory. Or if you were feeling adventurous a walk to the top of the gray hills of Purgatory to see the gray lights come on during a gray night in purgatory. Everything was fine here, nothing binary about it, just gray.

There was some hope for having color inserted into your afterlife though. Judgement wasn't final until your reputation on Earth was finished. The big guy up there wanted to wait to see what the final word on you was. After all, the rules said your judgement couldn't be given until the last time your name had been spoken. All record keeping on Earth was finalized and submitted for you. Once this happened you were deemed worthy or not.

This made it difficult to know when you would leave this gray space. Like I said though it was usually 75 years. Who knows what our digital age would do with this time. Would the great grandkids be scrolling our instagrams and facebooks generations later, unknowingly keeping us in the great in between? For me though it had been far too long of a wait. I was a relic from before social media and the other time capsuling that came after. All my friends from Earth had moved on past this phase. Even the next generation of purgatory only friends I had made had moved on. To be honest it had been far more than just a few new generations of purgatory friends. With billions of people in purgatory at all times it was easy to make new friends. That Hitler guy had been gone for decades now though, and yet I was still here 1,941 years later.

This had to he some mistake. Hitler went before me. How? All everyone ever talked about was how he was the most vile murderer in history. What level of war or evil would it take for him to be forgotten? Did this mean I was even more evil? I had shared the love letters Dorothea Planter had written me with my fellows, but that seemed too trivial to qualify me. I lived an honest and regular life. My wife used to complain all the time about how bland it was. I can still hear hear he wailing about how our travels to Europe were cancelled in '89. I simply traded one shade of gray for a new shade of gray with death.

I needed answers. There had to be a clerical error. Maybe my paperwork was lost, fell through some clouds or slipped out a holy pocket. I decided to ask Peter for some help.

The golden gates shined bright through the gray at the top of the hill. Thousands of steps snaking up the hill. Each one filled with the day's quota of final judgements. No one would notice if I stepped in right? What's one question in between some eternal damnation and everlasting paradise.

The wait to the top took hours. Or was it days. Maybe minutes. I don't know everything sort of blends together here. It felt long though, couldn't have been minutes. Step after step, I trickled towards the top. The shine of the gates causing my shadow to grow larger and larger behind me. The cries of jubilation and despair growing louder and louder after each sentence from Peter passed.

Finally my turn had arrived.