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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.
What kind of God would leave you burning forever? Most of you wouldn’t do that to a neighbor’s dog, even if it barked incessantly at two a.m. every morning. After about ten minutes watching a dog suffer in the kind of Hell you imagined God was going send his wicked children to, you would be pleading for the damned beast’s mercy. It’s crazy. Create a few beings; those that don’t obey you roast forever? Give me a break.”
“Injustice?” queried the demon sarcastically. “You were never concerned with justice a day in your life except when it was in your favor. Bye.”
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.
A book about my life from my own perspective would be very different from that of an observer who loved me, or from one who hated me. Which book is the right one?”
The never-ending sameness of all those I knew somehow blended with the sameness of this Hell. The same rooms, the same railings, the same kiosks, the same bedrooms with the same bathrooms, the same signs, with the same rug, and the endless stacks of books all bound with unerring sameness, seemed to match the sameness of the people, all white, all American, all died between 1939 and 2043, the same outlooks, the same haircuts, the same maddening habits. Homogeneity everywhere, endlessly stretching into an eternity of monotony.
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 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?
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.
