A thought on the afterlife

I don't pretend to know what the afterlife will be like, or if there even is an afterlife to imagine at all. These are things I know very little of, and by very little I mean nothing whatever. I know I am here and that is where my surety ends. I don't have faith in large amounts or, at times, much at all; I have an unending list of questions of which I have very few answers and the answers that I do have are unsatisfactory to say the very least. So. I don't know.
I hope for something wonderfully surprising.

I know how I think it should be and how I'd like it to be.
I know that I wouldn't want to worship a god who would send someone to burn in a hell for eternity.
But I believe in a God, a higher power who watches from above, our creator.
I know I can't sit in a crowd whilst a man stands upon a stage and tells me how to live and feel and what to think and do. A man who has been told by another man and that man has been told by another and so on and so forth.
I tried it once and never felt more alone. More rotten. More lied to.
I know I don't believe a book that has been written and re-written by man for thousands of years to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me god.
This is what I know of myself.
Of what I believe.

I'd like to think, as horribly cliched as it may seem, that soul mates merge together once they die and never leave each other, and live on. On to another life. Together. With families and friends and joy.
And all the hurt and doubt and fear dissipates and never returns. I'd like to believe that.
That would be my Heaven.

I'd like to believe that everybody, at their core, is good.
It's hard. Probably the hardest hope to hope.

Someone once wrote that one cannot go through life with one's eyes always open and that sentence has stuck with me. Though there may be many interpretations of it, I know what it means to me.
I know I have to believe in the good.
Other wise, what is there and more importantly how do we get through it?