A Short Stay in Hell

by Steven L. Peck

Strange, how a moment of existence can cut so deeply into our being that while ages pass unnoticed, a brief love can structure and define the very topology of our consciousness ever after.

The first years are the easiest to describe. They were years of adventure, companionship, and love. I have not seen anyone for uncountable years. Yet, even after so long, I still listen for the sound of another’s voice, the ring of footsteps on the stairs, or a figure moving silhouetted in the distance. Once I spent a year just listening.

Lastly, you are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.

Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives?

How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning – that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.

wasn’t that meaning? Wasn’t that something we could cling to? I could be with this other. I could form no other relation, but maybe her hand in mine was enough, both sufficient and necessary.

Have you ever loved someone for a thousand years? I would have bet it impossible, but that’s how long we were together. A thousand years we traveled the halls of Hell together. I don’t remember fighting. She was magic. Nights were wondrous. Days full of laughter and long, slow conversations.

I think our love could have lasted forever. I’m sure it would have. She was so … no, I won’t cheapen it by trying to express it in words and short sentences. I loved her. That is enough.

Ages of universes pass while I look at books of nonsense, yet I think on and on of a love so far in the past it is incomprehensible to believe it was even real.

What is love that it has such power? Whatever it is, it seems unlikely this God who placed me here knows anything about it. If it loved me in the least, could it inflict what it has upon me? Who can understand? Once I feared to say such things, dreading a worse punishment. But what worse fate could there be? To remember love and know it is unattainable? To know love wanders somewhere light-years and light-years distant, ever knowing it is forever out of reach? Forever hidden?

with a strip of cloth torn from my robe, and jumped. For eons I fell. Every morning I awoke, plunged the knife into my neck, and awoke the next morning only to do the same again. Over and over, every day. Sometimes I would stay awake for an hour or so, but then boredom would set in and I would use the bone knife again.

Finite does not mean much if you can’t tell any practical difference between it and infinite.

Every morning the despair gripped me, a cold despair that reached inside, creating a catatonic numbness.

Little else mattered. We did not exchange stories. We just clung to each other as only the lonely and lost damned can understand.

Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.