Illness

You know that feeling you get when you’re just starting to get sick?

Not the feeling when you ARE sick, being sick is a completely different feeling. Merely the feeling when you’re ABOUT to be sick.

You’re healthy, or at least you’re okay enough to go about your business, it’s just that you’re about to be sick. The feeling where you know it’s building, at the back of your throat, behind your eyes, at the bottom of your stomach, nothing’s wrong, but you know you only have a day or two before it all becomes tremendously wrong. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but your health’s about to drop out from under you, and the combination of pre-sickness and dread at what’s to come haunts you, lurking behind your every moment, making every cough and moment where you think you might sneeze but don’t, a horrific taste of what’s to come. You know that feeling, yeah?

Of course you do, we all do. That’s an important part of being human. We’ve all been sick, and therefore we’ve all been about to be sick. It’s as normal a feeling as breathing, or hunger, if a less frequent feeling as either.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling thusly, so long as you don’t feel it all the time.

Anyway: Going forward, you will feel that all the time.

Every second of every day, from this moment on, you will be about to get sick. You will never actually be sick, but you will always be on the verge, always skating the edge, always dreading the onset of a debilitating illness, every moment of every day, waiting for illness to set upon you.

It’ll never be a bad illness, merely the flu, the sort of thing you could recover from in a day or three if you could only just get it over with. But you’ll never get it over with, will you, no matter how long you might wait to…

You will never be sick, therefore you will never get better. You will merely be about to be sick. Every day. Forever, for all eternity. This is your existence, every moment of every day, until the end of time.

This is your punishment, for your sin. This is what hell is for you.

Other than that, your existence will be exactly as you’d expect it. You’ll go about your business as though nothing was wrong, but you’ll feel as though you’re about to get sick.

But you’re not sick.

But you’re about to be.

It seems like a minor irritant to deal with, I know.

Over the length of eternity, I look forward to watching you realize that it is not.

Emptiness

Endless nothingness stretches out in all directions, and however loud I scream, however I might search, there is no answer, no response. Nor, I know, will there ever be.

I am utterly and completely alone.

But I’ve been alone before, I’ve felt lonely and isolated, I’ve fallen deep into the pit of self and had no one to turn to, no one to whom I could bring my worries and pain, no one from whom to take solace.

This is nothing new to me, and I’ve always made it through dark periods in the past. It’s something I’m quite used to having to deal with.

Admittedly, previous isolation was less literal than this. That was a more personal loneliness, one born of despair, of depression, one that could be pushed through with a few simple reminders that however dark my mood, it was temporary, while this…

This is purgatory.

Or it’s hell.

Things got fuzzy after my death, it’s hard at times to remember exactly where I am. Lack of oxygen to the brain toward the end, I suppose. The noose does tend to do that.

Either way, I’m here now, and I have to make the best of it…

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.

...where nothing ever happens.

There is a party and everyone is there, and nobody will ever leave.

Never.

The band at the party play my favourite songs. Then they play them again. They play them all night long.

And it’s hard to imagine that nothing at all could go on forever, without hope of respite or variation for the exhausted partygoers.

And when the party’s over, it will start again. And it won’t be any different. It’ll be exactly the same.

Once, a man called this Heaven, but as I watch them, desperately making merry, eyes silently pleading, I grow to suspect the opposite…