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.
