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.

How can you think God would let something like Hell exist if He’s really in charge of the universe?

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

began to think how strange it seemed that I never met a single person of color. Not an Asian, not a black person, not a Hispanic, not anything but a sea of white American Caucasians. Was there no diversity in Hell? What did this endless repetition of sameness and of uniformity in people and surroundings mean?

I told her about my Mormon mission in Maine.

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?

Oh well, c’est la vie.

What kind of God lets demons choose such a bizarre Hell? Why put conscious beings through this? What purpose could it serve him or us? Was he/she/it worthy of worship? I honestly didn’t know.

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.

We can’t care about anything here. We can’t make a difference – all meaning has been subtracted, we don’t know where anything comes from or where it goes. There’s no context for our lives. We’re all white, equal ciphers, instances of the same absurdity repeated over and over. We try to scratch some hope or meaning out of it with our university, but ultimately there is nothing to attach meaning to. We’re damned.”

I rubbed her hand and she sighed; 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.

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.

I thought again of praying. I needed help far beyond what I could take control of, and prayer seemed the only measure I could take. But who would I pray to? This God of the Zoroastrians? A God who would send me to a place like this? What help would he be (if a he he was)? I didn’t know. I had no way to find out.

But somehow I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across universes. Yes, heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.

What I would have given even to see a cockroach in this place. It would be heralded as a treasure that could not be purchased with a king’s ransom. To see its six legs splaying from its thorax would have been a sight worth waiting for in a line a thousand years long. Songs would be written about its delicate multi-segmented antennae. Its wings would have inspired such poetry as to make people weep for decades at its telling.

Our attempts at music were nothing but a shadow of what we enjoyed on earth, but even more than music, we missed the natural sounds.

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?

There is a despair that goes deeper than existence; it runs to the marrow of consciousness, to the seat of the soul.

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

the only thing I could think of was our reunion. 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.

Now the search is all that matters. I know there will come a time when I find my book, but it is far in the future. And I know without doubt that it will not be today. Yet a strange hope remains. A hope that somehow, something, God, the demon, Ahura Mazda, someone, will see I’m trying. I’m really trying, and that will be enough.