Hell

It’s been said that hell is other people. This is not the case.

Hell is yourself, forever. Which is something you realize almost immediately upon arrival.

It’s a featureless plain where the dead stand, moaning in deep, existential despair. Despair at the people they’d hurt, the sins they’d committed, and the choices they’d left unmade. Most of them had promised each day of their lives to make more of their too-quickly passing time, but somehow they’d never managing to do so until it was far too late.

Now, in hell, those unmade choices haunt them perhaps the most of all, and they wail their sorrow and loss to the uncaring sky, lost forever in the crushing agony of a lifetime worth of mistakes brought suddenly into sharp, unavoidable focus.

They will be lost and hopeless in this hell of introspection and regret forever, without hope of escape, until the end of time. And they know this too, and it adds to the timbre of their wailing.

And yet…

And yet amongst them walk the joyful, looks of bliss plastered across their beautiful, beatific faces. They too know themselves, now, free from the illusions they’d crafted over the course of their mortal time, but unlike the damned they’ve made their peace with it, taking solace in creative work, good friends and beloved families left behind, taking stock of their lives and, on the whole, judging them to have been good.

And so among the damned wander the blessed, and in spite of the suffering occurring around them, for those lucky few this is heaven.

Because heaven is perfect understanding of who you are, what you’ve done, of the lives you’ve touched and how you’ve effected the world around you over the course of your time on Earth.

And hell is this also.