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.

Do you have any idea how long eternity is? My heavens, what an imagination you humans have. What kind of God would leave you burning forever?

“You were never concerned with justice a day in your life except when it was in your favor.

How do you pray if you don’t know what God is like?

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.

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.

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

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.