The Abyss
The Abyss was like nothing I'd ever imagined, nothing like what had been described to me. There were no white clouds, no angels playing music. It did not match my image of heaven; was it hell, I could not be sure. For in its other-worldness, it had a feeling of inexorable beauty, a feeling that reached up to you from below, wound its way to your mind and twisted itself around your soul. You could not shake the feeling that you were in a place of immense might and age, a place so huge nothing you said or did could make any difference.
I call it the Abyss, for that's what it was - a deep, bottomless chasm, with me falling all the way down, falling for an eternity. I do not know how fast I was falling, cannot say: the laws of physics did not seem to apply, with my descent speeding up and down almost at random. On the walls of the chasm there were images, shapes - almost like statues, but far more lifelike, both too alive and too dead at the same time. Angels, some of them - fearsome creatures of the Old Testament, so beautiful to behold that it burned your eyes and your soul, so beautiful to behold that your admiration and worship turned into terror and a feeling of nothingness. I let my eyes fall on them, but I never once had the courage to look on their faces, never once had the courage to see what their expressions would say of me. Had they looked upon me with disapproving eyes, I know I would have died then and there - even the fact that I was already dead could not alter this certainty.
I could neither hear nor make any sounds in the Abyss: several times I tried to speak, but I could not hear any sound resulting from it. Yet it was not silent, for I could feel my own thoughts, every thought I'd ever had, echoing from the rocky walls. Every moment, I felt them, at first as weak, barely perceptible vibrations of my body, then growing stronger and stronger until my bones felt like they'd burst. They would find their way to my skull, bouncing inside it until they found an outlet - what in my head exactly they used to escape, I couldn't figure out even though I tried. They would turn into echoes, not heard but felt, each thought adding to the cacophony of thoughts already filling the abyss. They were thoughts from my childhood to my old age, from being a toddler to being a grandfather, and though I had forgotten nearly all of them, now I recognized each one of them as my own. Each thought would echo in the walls until at some point it'd simply vanish, disappear so I could no longer feel it.
At times the echo of my thoughts would grow less intense, even to the point of vanishing entirely: I could always hear the echoes of the thoughts going through my mind at the moment, but no old ones would spring up from the depths of my soul. I would contemplate my existence during those moments, try to figure out what this place was and how I had ended up here, but I could never figure it out. All the time, I had a feeling that I was missing something important, a terrible certainty that I could never figure out the secret no matter how much I thought. At times I would ponder on my own life, try to see if the secret would be hidden somewhere among my memories - but each time I did so the thoughts within me would awaken, the thoughts of days long past beginning to again vibrate within me, until soon they again drowned out the thoughts of the present.
It was as if some great power had condemened me, condemned me to an eternal existence in the Abyss, reliving the thoughts of the old and watching the angels fall by. But such was the beauty of the place that I would never feel a desire to leave, never feel the desire to be alive again. Was it a hell or a heaven, I could not tell, but it was to be my lot in life, the place where I would spend the rest of eternity. And I had no way of escaping it, no way of even yearning for anything else: I could not know of an existence better spent, as each time I'd try to touch those memories the thoughts would swell from within me, drowning me in their cacophony once again.
This work is by Kaj Sotala and is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.