Notes

Desperation sets in the moment he realizes there’s no way out of the room, and his eyes go wide.

He’s already verified that the door, locked tightly from the other side, is too thick to batter down, and the room’s lack of windows or features of any sort makes it impossible to even consider other methods of escape. The floor is concrete, the ceiling equally so, the walls solid brick once he chips away enough of the plaster to see them. He doesn’t know how he got into the room, but he knows he’ll never leave, under his own power, at least.

And so: In sets Desperation.

Within minutes he’s screaming, within hours his fists have been torn bloody as they pound upon the walls, his voice hoarse as he calls, then threatens, then begs for release.

He’ll die of thirst in a matter of days, but by then he’ll most likely be mad, driven so by the combination of hopelessness and confusion that helplessness and lack of answers brings.

He’ll be a shell of a man, in a corner, babbling to himself. Just like all the other subjects I’ve put into this room for observation.

It’s disappointing, in its way.

People speak so highly of the power of the human spirit.

I have yet to observe it first hand…

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.

Quiet Desperation

The man in the next cubicle spoke to me today. It‘s odd, we’d worked together years, but never spoke.

“There’s more than this,” he pleaded desperately, “surely! I can’t stay in this office with the world out there to see, I need to fly!”

He then went to the window, threw a chair through it, and jumped.

Forty stories, and he leapt like it was nothing.

Perhaps he was mad, and fell to his death.

Perhaps he was right, and flew to freedom. I’ll never know, I didn’t follow to look.

I stayed at my desk, and continued my work.

All Empires Crumble

Alexander sat upon his throne, holding his head in his hands.

The news from his chancellor hadn’t been good. Two more provinces had risen up, overthrowing their provincial governors and joining in the separatist alliance. It seemed his empire was crumbling around him, and he didn’t know what to do to stem the tide.

He wondered what his father, he who conquered so much of the world and held it together by sheer force of personality, would do, and realized that his father would never allow his empire to fall into disrepair in the first place.

But his father was dead three years, of a strange wasting sickness he‘d caught in the tropical campaigns. And the glorious empire he founded was dying by inches, it’s people rebelling against the central governor.

The imperial senate were too busy lining their own pockets and intriguing against one another to govern, the generals, used to campaigns of conquest, were brutalizing the peoples of the empire, the governors growing fat off the labour of their subjects, then slaughtered like fattened calves as those same subjects rose up in rebellion.

And it was up to Alexander, of the fey features and gentle disposition, to hold it together, a task for which he was uniquely unqualified.

He breathed deeply, desperately wracking his brain for any solution, but none would come.

It took a few minutes for him to even realized he was crying.

All empires crumble, all nations fall.

The trick is to not be there when it happens.

Alexander, in the wreckage of a once glorious testament to human will to dominate, felt more like a prisoner than any man in history.