It’s been a while so here is something I’ve been working on the last few months when I’ve had a chance. I wanted to challenge myself and write something with a bit of world building, a bit of scale, but still very much sitting in the ‘what the hell is wrong with him’ vein that I seem to write these stories in. Trigger warnings for everything as per usual. Enjoy.
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It’s been 3 years since they invented Hell. I say invented, I could say ‘discovered’ or ‘unveiled' but invented seems to be a more apt description of what has happened. In the three years since, you would not believe the amount of hot takes and thought pieces surrounding the aforementioned invention of hell. I remember thinking that having to listen to all these conversations, articles, longreads must be as intolerable as hell itself, but we were all very naïve at the beginning.
Everyone remembers where they were when they announced the invention of hell. Like how older generations remembered where they were when Princess Diana died, everyone in the world remembers seeing the notification get pushed onto their home screens from every news site in the world. I was on the toilet, which isn’t quite the impressive and memorable of a story many other people had, so I would tell people I was at work, as if that improved the story at all.
‘Scientists successfully invent hell’ certainly is one of the most clickbaity headlines you can read on a mundane and grey winter morning. It was all anyone could talk about for weeks, months in fact. Every conversation at work, at the coffee shop or even at the petrol station started with “Have you heard about hell?” and then descended into a speculation that would never resemble anything quite like what would actually come to occur. Trying to talk about anything else during this time was entirely futile. I remember trying to ask someone about a TV show I was watching, and they looked at me with offended eyes as if my attempt to swerve the narrative was a slight against their very being. If you weren’t talking about hell, then you weren’t worth talking to. I hated those days. I miss those days.
There was a press conference two days after the first announcement. Every single channel showed it live, even the streamers had it as an option at the top of the page. I sat at my desk at work with it on in the background, trying to pretend it wasn’t important, like a Prime Minister’s Questions or a weather report. Three pasty small men in white lab coats fidgeted awkwardly behind microphones and their skin glistened with nervous sweat under the hot studio lights as the entire world tuned in to know what the hell (get it) was going on. This press conference changed the world forever. I miss the world beforehand, where people knew joy, where people threw themselves into hope and happiness and contentment, even apathy, but when everyone has seen the effects of hell, it’s incredibly difficult to come back from that as a society. The press conference itself was incredibly dull, just as I thought it would be, the men were not media trained and spoke with the enthusiasm of comatose librarians. It lasted three hours and most of the information went over the population’s collective heads. But there was enough information in there to keep the journalists and sceptics and professional contrarians busy for weeks. It was only when a corporation bought the technology that we began to discover the ramifications of their breakthrough. Suddenly Inferno Tech was the biggest company on the planet. Their stock prices overtook Apple and Microsoft within a day. The entire global economy shifted overnight. The rich became poorer, there was a levelling almost, we finally started to feel like everyone was the same. If the overarching fear of hell hadn’t been at the forefront of everyone’s minds, it may have even been called a good thing.
The TV news shows were filled with preachers asking why they hadn’t invented heaven instead. Apparently, you can’t invent something that doesn’t exist, which threw most religious sects into a rage. People either lost their faith or clung to it more than they ever had before. The division between the righteous and the ‘hellbound’ as they started to be called, skewed across every aspect of the world. Ambivalence and apathy were no longer options where damnation existed, but rapture did not. Through all this panic we still had no idea what ‘hell’ meant. The religious leaders dismissed it immediately, calling it a PR stunt for a new video game, the tech world called it a new AI breakthrough, the tabloids called it a new super-drug. Little did they know that they were all kind of right. It was a month after Inferno bought Hell that we finally found out what it meant. During this time religious terror attacks were now a common everyday occurrence, some people had taken the news of definite hell and improbable heaven quite badly. Inferno announced the press conference at 9am on a morning where spring was just starting to creep into the air. Once again everyone remembers where they were when the push notifications came through. I was once again, on the toilet. I swear I have other activities but both times major news around this broke I had treated myself to a sit down wee. Once again if I needed to retell the story I made it a tad more glamorous. The press conference was at 12pm that day. No work was done in those 3 hours. The world came to a standstill. No one could do anything else but wait with bated breath. The following is as much of a direct transcript of that press conference as I can remember, because to summarise it would do it a disservice. I used to wish this press conference had never happened. That we never met the subjects. That we never saw the effects of Hell. That the final justice had never been created. But I don’t wish about those things anymore.
“Good morning.” He said. The head of Inferno Tech was a tall imposing man in an expensive suit, sporting an expensive haircut and radiated the media training that the scientists of the previous conference had lacked. He took a sip of water from the glass at the lectern, put it back carefully and placed his palms on either side of the podium before looking directly into the camera. “We appreciate that there has been a lot of speculation around the first announcement of this new discovery in recent weeks, but we wanted to ensure that we had all the information before we spoke publicly.” He took a deep breath.
“As of the 5th of February this year, three scientists, Drs Haywood, Rhodes and Carmichael, successfully invented a way to experience Hell.” The room exploded with chatter. Journalists threw their arms into the air asking questions. The man behind the lectern tried to calm them. It took several minutes for a hush to fall over the audience. “I am here today to tell you what that means. So please.” The room calmed. An anxious calm but calm nonetheless. “Using a revolutionary new technology, we can help people experience Hell to its most biblical degree. This technology has been tested and has been proven to work under peer review and with help from our friends in the government. Our three pioneering scientists started by trying to create a portal to what we would call heaven, and in what may cause a large amount of debate in the future, this was impossible upon discovering conclusively that Heaven does not exist.” The noise from the reporters distorted the audio and it took a few minutes to get the crowd to settle back into their seats. “What they did discover however, was a link to what Dante, Lovecraft, Barker, all had visions of, a very real and a very horrifying reality that Hell exists, and we can now send people there.” He took another breath as the room exploded with questions once again. “I will get to your questions shortly please. Settle down.” The room went quiet. “We use a cocktail of drugs to expand the minds’ ability to traverse realities beyond our own. Then using a headset that was originally designed for virtual reality gaming of all things, we can engage the senses to a point where our world melts away, and this new reality becomes the true reality. To put it into terms everyone can understand, and we will release materials after this including layman’s terms and scientific explanations, we have found a way to free us from this plain of existence, and to show us the real world, the world of hell, of which we are all trapped in for eternity. This…” He gestured around the room “…is simply one layer of hell. And we have found the way to explore all of them.” The room was silent for the first time. The audience were pale, the blood rushing from their faces as panic overtook them. But not only over them, but all of us, every human on earth felt the impact of those words and knew that nothing would ever be the same again. Hands went up. Questions were shouted. The man at the podium looked solemn and uninterested. “Before I take your questions, I want to introduce you to someone.” He raised an arm and waved at someone offstage. From behind a curtain emerged a man in grey prison overalls, and when I say a man, I should say ‘what used to be a man’. Whatever this person was no longer seemed to have the presence of a human. His eyes were rolled back in his head, only the whites on show. His skin was grey and his whole body was emaciated as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks. There is a certain aura you get from seeing another human being, something we hadn’t noticed before everyone saw this man, because he did not have it. Just looking at him made you feel ill. He was an empty vessel. A former person. You couldn’t focus on him for too long without it making you uneasy. It was like everything that was human about him had been stripped away, and something wrong had replaced it. “This is Mr Birch. Mr Birch is a death row inmate whose crimes were among some of the worst a man can commit on this plain of existence. We worked with the government to test our new discovery on Mr Birch. My Birch is the first human ever to experience hell and come back, and as you can see, it leaves its mark on the subject.” The man in the grey overalls was whispering something that no one could make out. “What do you want to say Mr Birch? What do you want to say to the world?” The man at the podium removed the microphone and held it to the other man’s face. The words would be on every front page the next day. It would be quoted for years to come. It wasn’t profound and it wasn’t philosophy, but it made every hair stand to attention on every person watching.
“You had no right. Kill me. Please.” With that the man was removed from the stage and the crowd went bananas once again. I turned the TV off and threw up.
It took a sum total of 3 months for Hell to be the new major punishment in the prison system for serious offenders. It was hailed as one of the best things to ever happen to the world. All forms of major crime decreased almost immediately. Talk shows were populated with interviews of inmates who had seen hell, all of which spoke no sense, all asking for a quick death, and all causing an immense amount of dread and fear throughout the general public. The discourse was unbearable. Social media became a cesspit of interviews with the hellsent, until one day one of the original doctors of the Inferno project agreed to an interview with some American TV station that caused more uproar. We, the blissfully ignorant, still knew very little about what hell actually was. All we knew was that after you experience it, or visit it, or see it, whatever the proper term was, is that you’re left as a shell of yourself, a jabbering husk of humanity. Dr Carmichael did the interview after most governments in the world had signed a contact with Inferno Tech to bring hell to their prison systems. The Russians and the Chinese were the only two notable omits from the list, apparently they were working on their own versions, but had had no success. Carmichael didn’t really say much in all honesty, it was a puff piece, PR to try and calm down the idiotic masses. He waffled on about how the three scientists came up with idea, how they tinkered around in a lab in some town I’d never heard of in the heartland of the US. But at one point in the interview he let slip a new piece of information, a piece that would once again change our perspectives and change our way of thinking about the world. It was a simple little thing, and in retrospect an obvious thing, but all he said was that through the clinical trials of their discovery, every subject observed hell in a different way from anyone else. Hell is not the burning pit of molten lava that sits at the heart of our planet that we are all doomed to burn in for eternity while little goblins play with our entrails, it’s a unique scenario for every subject. He went on to mention that whilst you experience hell, time works very differently to our reality. They can put you in hell for a day on earth, but your brain will comprehend it as years, decades, even millennia. This is why every subject that was interviewed was so broken. They may only be 40 years old in the terms of our earth, but their mind has experienced epochs of suffering, and the human brain was not designed to endure this. I watched the interview on my phone whilst laying in bed one morning and as it came to an end I continued to lay there for hours on end. I missed work, I forgot to have lunch, I just sat and pondered over this information until I had a headache and started looking at terrible cooking videos to take my mind off it.
That night I met a bunch of friends at our local pub, a standing appointment we have had every two weeks for as long as I have lived in the city. This was to ensure through the hustle and chaos of every day life, that we did not lose touch with each other. We had missed a few of these standing appointments recently, but decided we all needed the familiarity of friends right now. We met at 7pm on an evening where spring was fading and summer was threatening to take its place.. We usually sit there, have a few drinks, discuss our work woes, say how tired we are and how we are too tired to do anything interesting, and then get home at a reasonable time as we are all at the boring side of thirty. But this time it was different, every face around the table was deep in self exploration, until someone finally said: “What do you think your hell is?” This question would be the talking point of every conversation for the next year. It was all anyone could think about, and for some it would become an addiction, a primal need to know what comes after this life, to know what torment awaited you for eternity. If you could know how you were going to spend forever, wouldn’t you want to know how bad it would be so you could prepare for it? A lot of us did. We sat around the table for hours reaching into the dark crevices of our minds for the answers. No one touched their drinks. Chris was the first one to say anything. It surprised us all as Chris was the most sensible of our weird little cohort. Chris was boring, Chris was sensible. He wore ties to work even though he didn’t have to and his drink of choice was water. Chris was the quiet one, the one who made sure we were all doing okay, and the one to call it a night when the rest of us would have called it three hours later and felt worse for it. “Public speaking. That’s going to be my hell.” He grabbed my pint from in front of me and took a mouthful. Chris only drunk when he was stressed so this wasn’t a great sign. “I’ll be stuck on a stage in front of an endless auditorium, filled with an infinite amount of people, and forced to go through a speech I haven’t rehearsed for eternity. That’s my hell I think.” We all went quiet again. No one really knew what to say, it was a very good conversation killer. After that Matt to Chris’s left spoke up saying that his hell would be suffering the death of a loved one, over and over and over again. Mel was next to suggest her fate. Spiders, crawling over her naked skin, their tiny legs invading every crevice of her body. They all looked at me as I retrieved my pint from Chris and took a swig. I didn’t answer, but I knew what my hell would be, it was obvious to me, and it scared the shit out of me.
It took 6 months for hell to become available to the general public. I say available, you had to know someone who knew someone who found something on the dark web, but it didn’t take long for hell to become a very real thing that people could experience if they had the time, energy and money. For some it became an obsession. It was all they could talk about and think about, spending every waking moment contemplating their afterlife swallowed people and spat them back out as former versions of themselves until they could finally make it a reality. On every street you could see the hellsent, slumped against shops or cowering in alleyways, their eyes void of life or hope, their mouths jabbering silent and hysterical prayers. The prison system was now so effective that people went in for a day, got sent to hell, and they just threw you back out into the world as a chattering zombie. Charities were formed to try and save them, or at least get them from the streets, but every day more and more hellsent appeared. Some from prisons, but more that had tried it at home and their families could no longer bear them being around. It seemed like human beings only had two paths now, either dive into the world of religion and blindly ignore the reality of what was happening out there, or pull the plug and visit hell yourself. Until we chose one of these it was like living in purgatory. No one could concentrate on their normal lives. Relationships faded away, ambition disappeared, love was replaced with fear.
Whilst hell was available to find if you could be bothered to look, the easiest way to experience it was to commit a crime. With punishment being so quick, criminals were usually released back into the world as hellsent after 24 hours. After a few months it was downgraded as a punishment for serious offenders to moderate offenders, then after a few more months it was the deterrent for every crime imaginable. One person at work told me that they had heard of someone who got stopped for speeding getting sent to hell. It was every political party’s hidden motto, you misbehave, you go to hell. Life was nothing now, it was simply a waiting game. Hell would come sooner or later, and more and more people opted for sooner. It was a cold autumn evening as I left the pub by myself that I found Chris huddled under a bridge on my walk home. His clothes were filthy, his feet bare, his skin grey and withered like canvas pulled too tight over a skeletal frame. But what I would never forget were his eyes. Dilated to the point of bursting, perpetually screaming in agony. I knelt next to him and tried to shake him out of it, but he didn’t even notice I was there. He just kept whispering incomprehensible nonsense under his breath. I dragged him home and lay him on the sofa as I intended to formulate a rescue plan. In the morning he was gone. I had no idea how he got out of the house, he was so comatose he couldn’t have opened a book let alone a locked door, but I never saw him again. All I could remember was the smell that lingered in the flat for days, a putrid stench that sunk itself into the furniture and walls. I had never smelled death before but if I had to guess what it smelt like, it was this.
Three years since the first TV broadcast announcing the invention of hell, the world was a grim idea of what it once was. My friends were all gone. Our weekly standing appointment at our local pub was now just me sat remembering what once was as I drank heavily. There were only the saved and the hellsent, and the hellsent outnumbered the saved more and more every day. I had finished my last drink, swayed as I stood and had exited the pub, lighting a cigarette as I exited the door. I kept an eye out for Chris or Matt or Mel like I always did. I didn’t smoke a millimetre of the cigarette, I let it burn to ash between my fingers until it burnt me. I flicked it into the road. It was then I was stopped by two police officers.
Of course the term ‘police officer’ had been made redundant at some point around six months ago, they now enjoyed being called ‘the final justice’ which was a bit on the nose for my liking.
“Are you okay there sir?” One of the FJs said to me as I did my best impression of a sober person.
“Yes sir, absolutely fine thank you!” I now see that my attempt at charm did not land on these two gentlemen.
“You know that’s littering don’t you? That’s a hellbound offence.” The other FJ said. I could see in his eyes that he enjoyed his job. He enjoyed sending people to damnation. He was probably a wannabe bully in school who had now gained a taste of power and misusing it at every available opportunity.
“I’m sorry.” I paused trying to think of an excuse. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“Have you been drinking sir?” The first FJ asked. It was at this moment I knew that they wouldn’t be satisfied with just littering. That they would need ‘causing a public nuisance to add to the list, and as every person who has ever been drunk knows, when you are drunk and try to act sober, you just act more drunk.
“I have had a few yes, just trying to find my friends.” I thought honesty would be the best policy here. “I’ll pick up my cigarette end and we can pretend this never happened hey lads?” I have no idea why I added the word lads to that sentence but for a moment I thought I would be ok. I was wildly incorrect.
“We are going to let you go this time.” A rush of relief swelled through my body. “But don’t let it happen again ok?”
It was at this moment that my body betrayed me and the menu of drinks I had decided to partake in that evening decided they would feel more at home on the floor and on my shoes. A brief second of horror filled the air between us before I was manhandled down the road and forced into the back of a justice van. I spent the entire journey wondering when I would be able to clean my shoes, until I blacked out.
My eyes were so filled with sleep that I thought I must have been out for days. It was an effort to open them, like jarring an old garage door open. Wherever I was it was dark. My anxiety filled my brain as my blurry eyes panicked to get into focus. I fumbled around and my hands met concrete, damp concrete and my brain refused to take in what was so obviously before it. A cell, about 7 feet by 7 feet wide, just big enough that I could stand, just long enough that I could lay down, but small enough to feel trapped. The black concrete ran with black mould and fetid water, as my brain caught up with itself the smell hit my nostrils, a wet and dead smell, like rotting bark left for decades, no, it was the smell of my parent’s old compost bin. I remember hating having to put the scraps of meals in that bin, seeing all the insects scurry from the light as I opened the top and threw them in as quickly as I could. It was that exact smell. On one side of the room was a steel door, with a small grate at perfect eye level. A tiny amount of light poured through the grate, enough to cast shadows but not enough to be able to see any details of my surroundings. I could feel a tightness around my temples, and a shooting pain in my arm. I checked my arm for marks and ran my hands over my head but there was nothing, but the pain persisted. I approached the grate at the door and peered through. Blackness. An unsettling endless dark that made no sense. A light was coming from somewhere, but not from out there. I examined my room again. At this point I refused to acknowledge it as a cell, it was a room. The irrational (or rational I’m not sure which) part of my brain was ignoring the obvious for the moment. This was just the police station, sorry, Final Justice Office, and I was awaiting judgement. But the rational part of my brain knew, I knew what this was, I didn’t want to believe it, my mind rejected the very idea of it, and I kept hoping and praying this wasn’t it.
I must have passed out again because I remember that beautiful moment of confusion as you wake up and reality sat in a nonsensical haze. For a brief moment I had no idea where I was, what was happening to me, I was just a human being who was waking up. It was my only function and my only worry. Then the smell hit me and I was back in that god damn room with that compost smell. The walls appeared to weep with misery, the grate at the door provided enough light but never confessed its origin. I remained on the floor as long as I could, hoping to wake up, hoping something would jerk me out of this dream or hallucination or mania, whatever I was experiencing, but it never did. I think I lay unmoving for 4 days. I couldn’t tell, there’s no way to tell the time in this place. It could have been hours, it could have been minutes. I was starving and my mouth was dry, at no point had I been delivered food or even heard a noise from outside the door. I had never felt this sort of hopelessness. On what I think was the fifth day I started trying to suck the moisture from the walls. It tasted exactly as it smelled, putrid and dying, I gagged as I tried to find any form of moisture to quench my thirst, but no matter how much I mouthed and tongued that death stained concrete no relief ever came. I fell to the ground and cried, like I hadn’t cried in years. I could count on one hand the amount of times I had cried before this, in my life before this, but out of pure desperation, I wept and wept for what felt like days.
I woke from a dreamless sleep to a knock at the door. I bolted up and threw my face into the grate, hoping to scream bloody murder and obscenities that would make god weep at whoever was on the other side. But no one stood there. Just the endless dark. An obsidian abyss. Until a voice spoke and the sound deafened me. I had been so used to a violent silence that the vibrations of a voice set my mind on fire. My eardrums almost burst. My temples burned with pressure. I wanted to shout back, to scream and plead for freedom, but the pain was everything. In that moment I had no idea what was said, the noise was so abstract and foreign and torturous I couldn’t comprehend it. But now I know. Now I know it said simply and efficiently:
One month.
I only came to understand this when the voice came back ages later, and I heard under a blanket of excoriating pain, “six months”. It was the first time I could understand its words without falling completely apart in agony. It was when I heard “Twelve Monthsr” that I accepted where I was. It had taken this long for the rational part of my mind to take over, as if it had been hiding until this moment, to realise that I was in hell. For over a year I had not had any food, my stomach now just constantly argued with my body and I had no retort. I sucked the walls as much as I could, feeling that this may be some form of sustenance, but I think I knew that this was myself trying to find routine, or trying to find some semblance of normalcy in this place. Some days I would pound my fists against the steel door until my fingers broke and the joints cried so much blood I would pass out. When I awoke my hands were fine, and I would try again. For years I threw my fists at that door and years I got nowhere.
It was at year twenty where my father appeared in the room with me. One morning I scraped my head off the wet concrete and allowed that vile air to penetrate my lungs and there he was. Stood in the corner, blair witching away from me so I couldn’t see his face. I grabbed him and shook him and prayed that he would respond but he was immovable, a statue-esque nightmare in this prison with me. It only took days for me to realise why he was here with me. Because I found him withholding, because our relationship was strained, because I had always tried to impress him and got nothing in return, and as I screamed these facts at him he refused to turn. He was a monolith in my hell, a reminder of my insecurities and my paranoia, and after 3 years of him stood there refusing to talk I began pleading with the walls, with the voice that came every month, anyone, to take him away. They never did. For one hundred and forty seven years he stood in that corner, mocking me, humiliating me, watching me lose myself as I tried everything to get him to notice me. Until one day he was gone.
For two months I was by myself again, and I enjoyed those two months, as much as one can enjoy two months imprisoned in hell. I tongued the walls and slept and repeated these tasks over and over again trying my best not to let my mind turn to porridge with the inevitable futility of my situation. I was trapped, probably for eternity, in a cage of endless nightmares, but I still felt like me. I promised myself this wouldn’t break me. I wouldn’t end up like the hellsent I saw on the street or the ones they paraded out in front of talk show audiences. I could get through this. I’d seen what they could throw at me. I do miss being this naïve. I really do.
“Three Thousand, Six Hundred And Two Months”
The voice was a welcome respite from the horrific silence that blanketed the every day. I had never been very good with maths, a D at GSCE, so it took me a while to realise that this was my three hundredth year in hell. It was shortly after that (shortly now becoming a term that had lost it’s original meaning) in year three hundred and twelve that she arrived. I was sat in the corner of my forever room holding my knees and trying to remember what food tasted like when I heard a noise at the steel door. Not the voice I had grown slightly accustomed to, even if its arrival still caught me off guard, but the gentle rapping of fingers across the grate, and then the tiny amount of light I was permitted was blocked, as she started crying.
“Why? Why did you do it?”
I didn’t need to look up to see who it was. I ignored her for months, for as long as I could before I broke down and threw my fists into the steel door. Her eyes bore into mine like a needle into my retina. I hadn’t seen human eyes in years, the blue-ish brown-ish colouration of them made every hair on my body stand on end. This was another person. Another human in this place of desolate hope. Her fingers clung through the grate, her perfect nail polish just barely gleaming in the light that managed to get around her. One day I tried piercing my eardrums so I couldn’t hear her anymore. A few years later I bore my thumbs into my eye sockets so I couldn’t see her eyes anymore. Every morning after I woke up with no injuries on me. Just her. Stood there.
“Why?” she screamed again. And I, after decades of not hearing my own voice, whimpered as cowardly as a man could, “I’m sorry.” But I knew this would never be enough. This wasn’t a redemption arc, this was cosmic torture, and I would have to endure her, for hundreds of years, asking why. And I did. My stubbornness and my ego hadn’t fallen apart like the rest of my body, which now was an emaciated replica of what it once was, I simply couldn’t bring myself to answer her. For five hundred years I watched her cry and beg for answers, and I couldn’t. I knew the moment I apologised some new horror would appear to torment me. Another person from my past would appear to torture me for decades and I think at some point my mind simply went into stand by mode. I would sleep only due to exhaustion, and when I gained consciousness she would be there, staring at me through the grate, her fingers holding on so tight blood poured down the metal, asking “why.”
“Twelve Thousand, Eight Hundred months”
I remember this date for two reasons. One, because this was the day she left. And two, because, after using my terrible D level maths, I had been here for a thousand years. I would look down at myself and see a skeleton with flesh sprinkled over the bones like dust. Hunger was now a memory or a dream, I quenched my thirst from the walls. I hallucinated or saw (I was never sure which) more regrets from my past. The kid I bullied at school stood with me for a century, the version of me that tried to take his own life by scraping bic razors over his wrists performed his pantomime for a millennia. My brother appeared for a few decades to just stare at me and laugh. My mind at this point was numb, I couldn’t comprehend what was around me. I tucked myself into a corner and wept for eons. I no longer registered the voice at the door telling me how long had passed, I just sunk into this place, accepted it and let it fold itself across me. After enduring every regret, every selfish action, every missed opportunity for so long that time stopped having meaning, I was empty. My humanity had been sucked dry and I was just a husk, a former human. Somewhere in me there was a memory of who i once was, but it started to die like a flame at the base of a candle. It had taken longer than any human mind would be able to comprehend but I finally reached the point of exasperation. It was like my mind crashed. Reset. Everything that once was had died, been deleted and all that remained was a human shaped thing that once resembled a person.
The blinding light of the sun exploded my retinas, a searing pain forcing its way through me and for a moment I was thankful for it. I welcomed the pain as if it were a reassurance that I was still a bit human. But I was hellsent now. I can’t tell where I am, I can’t respond when you ask who I am or if I need help. I have seen forever in all of its suffering and it has ruined me. I am a vacant body laying on the street you would step over if you had the misfortune to see me. I never thought about what my hell would be, I have no idea what Chris or Matt or Mel endured, and I didn’t remember who they were anyway, but as I lay discarded I accepted my fate. For one beautiful moment I realised I had endured everything, and the endless dark outside the steel door that I had screamed into for eternity possessed me.