What the hell is heaven?

This morning, on hold with a client, who was at her place of work when she called, I was subjected to a rather mediocre pseudo rock 80s song for about thirty seconds while she scoured for information. The hook of the song struck me, amidst the generic, twangy soft rock.

"What the hell is heaven?"

After I got over the fact that this company found this song appropriate as hold music, I lazily jotted the line on my notepad. For some reason, it was really funny in that moment, and I mouthed the rather unimaginative wordplay and smiled. Even now hours later when I think about it I laugh a little. But as trite as I thought it was, and bemused I was by it, it still got me thinking: what the hell is heaven, for me?

My heaven is my mother's house, the two-story, tan house with green shutters at the end of the street in a suburban-but-really-rural northeastern Pennsylvania town, where I lived full time from ages 12 to 18, and then periodically through college, and then only as a visitor for the past two years.

I can think of no better way to spend my eternal afterlife than within those walls, probably drinking a lot of keurig coffee and watching a lot of jeopardy and luckily, if I'm in a ~warmer afterlife, plenty of swimming.

But then...then I felt a weird guilt. I feel a sort of guilt for being 24 and still attached to this obvious substitute for the womb.

Shouldn't my apartment, one I happen to share with a man I love, that I picked myself, that I decorated, that I spend most of my nonworking life in, shouldn't that be my heaven? My port in the storm? Surely, real adults don't fantasize about their mommy's house. Not only that but it seemed to cheapen what I've built here, of my own choosing and design, and so, guilt.

And you'll have that, I guess. Or I will at least, as a perpetual and often irrational guilt sufferer.

But the truth is the truth, which is why I felt guilty.

The truth is I've never felt as blissfully happy in a museum in Paris, in the best restaurant in Rome, in a cushy luxury bed in a midtown Manhattan hotel, roaming the peaceful, serene highways of Texas, or even sitting on my butt watching Family Guy and smoking hookah with my beloved in my own apartment in my favorite city in the world as I am laying on my mom's worn, slightly crooked couch while the sun pours in from the French doors and she sips coffee nearby. I just don't. All the traveling I've done has only further confirmed this as a fact.

One aspect of growing up I'm finding difficult to cope with is the complete and utter responsibility I have for my surroundings, how there is no one to plan my vacations, arrange my schedule, filter my friendships, or create my home. It's a thrilling, beautiful freedom but there is at least now, a loss of security in that freedom. So no matter how lush I can arrange my apartment, no matter how relaxed I can be in it, it will never be truly blissful. Bliss involves a kind of ignorance, a lack of responsibility, and it seems that diminishes just a little more everyday. Without bliss, a place can't really be heaven, can it?

I wish the client would have let me on hold just a little bit longer so I could find out what indeed the hell is heaven.