There was earth, there was heaven and there was hell and then there was his place. At times this place felt like she had her own personal reservation in hell. So, at times she tried to picture what actual hell may be like, with vivid imagery she made the picture in her head of the worse possible hell you could imagine, just to try to distract her from this world, to try to beat the imprisonment of self she felt here.
Her imagined hell wasn’t the conventional hell you read in the story books or seen in the movies. Because hell was unseen to the human eye, she depicted it in her own dark light.
Hell wasn’t a closed in cave, full of jagged, pointed edges, demons lurking around, flames everywhere. It wasn’t full of your worst fears like spiders, clowns or heights. At least not your typical worst fears, but instead the fears you never knew you harbored. And the Devil wasn’t a scary red man with horns, a tail and pitchfork, surrounded by flames but instead was your mother, sister, brother, neighbor, lover.
In her imagery, Hell was not full of bright, warm flames to lighten up the place, instead in her mind it was full of vast fields that stretched on forever. Cotton fields where all you can see was the white tips of cotton, otherwise a black ominous field that went on forever. And you we’re told that happiness waits just on the other side of the field but the other side never seems to come.
Your legs got weary, your head faint. There were people meant to help guide you on your journey but every time their help was needed you either lost your voice or your tongue became made of iron, impossibly thick to speak through.
Or sometimes you were able to speak but the words all came out backwards or jumbled and misunderstood. Sometimes you actually managed to get a full sentence out and you were so relieved you could get it out, just to figure out the so called humans you were talking to were not humans at all, they turned around to reveal hideous, mutant faces.
The creatures would give you false hope by giving you the wrong directions. The field became a never-ending maze. A maze of the mind. The searching went on, and on, and on until the mind succumbed to a sort of madness.
Being misguided and lost was a hell already imprisoned in her mind and she knew if there was a hell it would be closer to a dark room with no way out with nothing but your fears to keep you company opposed to a fiery pit full of light and a man in a red suit.
When she closed her eyes and pictured hell–a place she figured she would one day be–she sometimes seen an crashing ocean on a stormy night, full of waves and some deadly creature thrashing and slashing the water and the side of whatever sort of little boat she was in. Hissing, and clawing, rocking the boat, making it seem impossible to stay afloat.
The dark ocean meeting the horizon of the even darker sky, seemed to all meld into one and everything around her was darkness, still, except for the thrashing of the creatures which toppled the ocean with rocking waves and filled the air with painfully, loud, ear piercing screeches.
Her stomach was in knots and a nauseated almost sickening feeling seemed to linger, no matter how hard she tried to shake it.
The uneasy feeling would never leave her as long as she was in this place.
Every fear she had ever had in life were now bouncing around her mind like dodge balls, attaching themselves onto to her subconscious, until without knowing why, she is a profound wreck on the floor of the small boat, rocking back and forth, muttering at the voices, clutching at her head, trying to get the dodge balls to still and the bugs to go to sleep. And the journey doesn’t end, and she is told that is never will, but instead will get worse. The whispers in the dark air prepared her.
The ocean stretches on forever, the creatures only seeming to get bigger, the voices louder, the waves higher and crashing with more intensity. The fears heightened. The air got colder as time went on and became full of shrieks and screams of agony. Physical and mental torture. Warfare of the mind.
You either remain strong, keep all the crazy in or go mad by the voices, the screams, the taunts, and the hatred towards you and the laughing, all the laughing at all the things you’ve never finished, or never started. For all you missed, the good you didn’t do, for all you questioned, all you wronged. The voices will remind you. But you will eventually start to realize that it is no one’s voice but your own. You created all the expectations in your own programed mind.
In a society that people hold the misconception of a belief that it is high-functioning when we decide to set rules for success, right’s and wrongs, weird vs. normal, it’s hard not to create expectations. In a world so filled with judging eyes.
The hatred is usually created by yourself. One you are meant to sit and stew in the rest of your life. Because we all question ourselves, and wonder if we did enough. This feeling of being inadequate, worthless, a waste to the human species, will double, even triple in this hell of yours. They don’t just linger but bugger you and convince you of things your mind should never have to endure.
Warfare of the mind. The soul.
You weren’t strong enough in life to overcome the boundaries that society set for you, you let your insecurities get the best of you. You didn’t let go of the stresses of mind and heart and truly find self, true self, therefore this place is destined for nothing but to create misery, self-doubt, longing, unrelenting questioning and a pure- untainted hatred of self. The only escape seems to be to get out of the tangled web of your mind where the voices don’t stop and the judging and the mocking seems to rip you to your core.
So, the creatures tell her there’s a way out. There is an escape, it’s easy. Just take this pill, this little green pill they say will take it all away. You have never trusted these creatures before but your cold, and sick to your stomach with torment and all you see is the vast black sea on all sides of you, enclosing you in a world devoid of hope, all of nature’s beauty demolished, light non-existent. No end in sight. Nothing could make this worse.
The air that was filled with screams of agony, got louder, the wind making it seem impossible to stay afloat. Her head was a mess, she was in jitters, and her heart hurt physically as she observed that the screams of agony coming from the tortured minds and souls were far worse than that of the physical ones. And she knew the difference. She heard those cries of physical pain everyday down the hall of her bedroom in the next room, ever since she was just a girl.
So, she took the little green pill. To get the fuck out of her head at the very least. Only to realise that the creatures were jokers: the pill only intensified the fears, the voices all became louder, her head on the way to exploding completely it seemed, the sounds of thrashing waves and screeching creatures and agonised screaming reverberated through her brain. It seemed to be rattling around in her skull.
All this now mixed with new sounds that seemed to get swept in by the wind. The sounds of bones clacking together, like wind chimes- clack-click-clack-clack. When she pulled her head out of her knees and pried her hands away from clutching at her head, she looked up and confirmed what she heard. There were hundreds of thousands, millions even, of wind chimes all made up of human bones. Fingers, knee caps, cartilage, full skulls, half skulls, toes, collarbones, shins, big bones, small ones, thinner ones, thicker ones, all clicking together making different tones, creating a most eerie melody that ebbed and echoed in every direction, bouncing off each other and retracting back to where she was. All the bones hanging not even 4 feet above her from unseen hooks that seemed to be coming from the sky which was creeping closer by the hour, or minute, or second; really she couldn’t tell how quick or slow time was passing, the concept of it was unknown to her in this place.
The clacking sounds mixed with the shrieks and now with the deafening screech of a train stopping dead in it’s tracks-screeeeeeeech– the ear bleeding noise thrashed through the air louder than anything she’s ever heard, threatening to pop her ear drums. The mix of the sounds, including the whispers and mocking, the ridicule, and sounds of screaming children in agony, moms, dads, sisters, brothers, grandmas: they all mingled together creating the most unsettling, mind-agonising melody. Enough to drive anyone mad.
But sometimes, only sometimes, when things got really bad, she closed her eyes and conjured up this hell on purpose. She became more used to it the more she went there. It was just to see if she could possibly create a hell in her mind worse than the one she was in.
Not to her surprise, in spite of her vivid imagination, she has yet to create a worse hell than the one she was living now. And she realised she probably never will for, this must be hell already.
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If you are interested in reading about a variety of different subjects such as mental health, inside the minds of disturbed artists, the importance of being an introvert, importance of body language and non-verbal communication, the importance of mental rehearsal and imagery, the power of our minds, mindfulness, metaphysics and the cosmic world and how all the great genius’ of the past have tapped into this power to achieve seeming miracles, addiction, abuse, the effects loneliness and so much more, please check out some of my other posts:
