“In a World of My Own”, sung sweetly by Kat Edmonson with the trio Duchess, is my favourite song to-day. It’s a light and charming slice of vintage pop, a description which by itself doesn’t do justice to its ineffable, otherworldly magic. Listening, trancelike, on endless repeat to its gentle strums, soaring theremin whistles, and impossibly tender vocal harmonies, I am filled with a deep, transcendent longing.

I like to imagine that after I die, I’ll be in some sort of holding room and this is what’s playing hazily through the walls.

Cats and rabbits

Would reside in fancy little houses

The chamber opens before you. Cavernous, yes, but welcoming. The walls are a friendly baby-blue with painted clouds. Clean, almost sterile. Rows of benches, reminiscent of a stylish airport, face the far wall, divided by a central aisle. The layout suggests an auditorium without a stage. An indeterminate number of people are scattered across the seats, heads down. Mostly silent but for some flipping of pages and shuffling of children’s toys echoing across the room.

It’s like some sort of waiting room. For what? There’s nothing but a great wall.

“Excuse me?” you call out, your voice wavering. “I’m sorry, I don’t, er, I don’t know what I’m doing here?”

No response from anyone. Not even a shift of a head.

“Oh, okay, I guess I’ll just, er, sorry about that,” you find yourself trailing off.

You take an empty seat next to an older woman immersed in a paperback.

All the flowers

Would have very extra-special powers

They could sit and talk to me for hours

After an uncomfortable length of silence, you break. “Hi, sorry to bother you, but do you know what’s going on around here?”

The older woman turns to you. She raises her index finger to her mouth. Shh.

Clearly you don’t belong here. What is here? It’s like no place you’ve ever been. How did you get to be here? You find you can’t remember, actually, you’re pretty sure you had memories, but they have an indistinct haziness to them. Focus! Your mental recall is taking much more effort than you expected, maybe you were in your apartment? You can just barely remember that. Something about you is slipping. You have to get out.

Except there’s no back wall. A smoky suffusion of grey from wall to wall, a void into which no light penetrates more than a few feet. Tendrils of smoke undulate gently across a roiling barrier that has a horrifying aliveness to it. No way this is where you came from. Are you going to step back through that?

Not today.

“Hey,” you place a hand on the woman’s shoulder, barely hiding desperation, “is there a way out of here?”

“There is no way.” A resigned look on her face.

“Okay, do you know what this place is?”

“Nobody knows, dearie. It’s some kind of holding room. Sometimes a door opens up on the other side.” She indicates the centre of the far wall. There is most definitely no door there. “It materialises from thin air, you might say. And there’s a lady who calls someone’s name, but we’ve never seen her, just heard her voice call out, so-and-so, please come forward. There’s no loudspeaker or anything, we have no idea where her voice comes from. And so-and-so stands up and walks through that door into the Beyond.”

“The Beyond?”

“That’s what we call it. And we never see them again.”

“Gosh. How often does this happen?”

“I don’t know. It’s unpredictable. Sometimes it’s a matter of hours between calls, but sometimes years pass.”

“Wait, years?”

There’d be new birds

Lots of nice and friendly howdy-do birds

“Yes, years. Time passes differently here. I’ve myself waited here for a few decades. That’s nothing, though, some of the front-seaters up there have spent millennia in this room.”

“Millennia? But, but—”

“Yes, dearie. Thousands of years lost in thought in those seats.”

“—but wait, do they even eat? Or sleep?”

“We don’t. None of us do.” She pauses only a little, not long enough to fully appreciate your confusion. She’s probably tired of explaining this to newcomers. “Things work differently here. We don’t need to eat or sleep. All those biological worries somehow just don’t exist here. Your body is nothing, your mind is everything. But your mind also begins to waste away, to forget everything, to lose the connections that tether you to the universe.”

“Wait, what do you mean, tether you to the universe?”

“As far as we can tell, this place exists entirely separate from reality. A shared dream, or we’re outside the simulation, or something. Whatever it is, the laws of reality don’t apply. Ask Dottie over there, she has lots of these ideas.”

“So you do talk to each other sometimes?”

“We do, yes. Or at least, we did, but what’s the point now? We exhausted all topics of conversation years ago. Exhausted ourselves. At this point everyone values the silence, treasures it. If you know what’s good for you, you give them their silence.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” You shuffle uneasily, staring across the rows of people which you probably just irritated. “But why? Why this place? Why us?”

“I’m sorry, dearie. Nobody knows why. Nobody knows. Peter there has a theory that we’re all dead, we’re ghosts waiting to get into heaven. Or hell.”

Are you dead? Are you a ghost? You don’t know what to make of this, but she goes on.

“Not everyone makes it. The front-seaters, at their advanced stages, they can’t remember much of anything. Some of them have even forgotten their names. Once that happens, once you’ve lost the ability to recognize your name being called, you can’t really leave. Whether they still have anything like a mind is anybody’s guess.”

I could listen

To a babbling brook

And hear a song that I could understand

At this moment a commotion ripples across the room. There’s suddenly a door in the centre of the far wall where there was never a door. Glossy and gleaming, it stands grander than any door you’ve seen, as if it were meant for beings three times as tall as humans. It seems undefinably out of place with the rest of the room.

And then, over the course of ten seconds, it slides open. Beyond it lies a void. A featureless blankness. The Beyond.

Somebody’s about to be called through the doorway.

“Jill Colborn?” a woman’s voice announces, clear and metallic, from no discernible source. “Please come forward.”

You exchange a glance with the woman, whose name you forgot to ask. Now you’ll never know. You rise, walk trembling across the central aisle, and brace yourself as you approach the doorway.

Because my world be a wonderland