Charlie

Darkness was all I’d ever known. It was all I was. There was not an ounce of me that wasn’t consumed by it. Every day was night. It became me. I became it. I don’t remember how long I’d been there, only that there were two worlds: all-consuming darkness, and a light I’d never known.

Every day was as dark as every day before it, and each moment passing was just as dark as any time I’d ever come to understand. 

There was an oddness — an oddness that ate my bones. The times I breathed felt as though I was swimming in a nothingness that consumed only the parts of me that I did not understand. There was so much to know, so much to learn, so much to evolve into. My future was my past and my past was my future, all of time blending into nothing so I could exist in nothing. Nothing was time. Time was nothing. Every second was a time where the blackness existed, warming me, keeping me safe, and allowing me to become who I was on my own time, in my own terms, existing to exist, existing to not exist, until the existence who I was became all I would ever know.

All I wanted to know. 

It was only when the growing of my mind began to open up when I began to realize what was happening to me. It was as if I was asleep in a great dream that never ended — as if my entire body was paralyzed until my belief system grew into what the darkness was, an evolution of self, an evolution of being.

Blackness cradled my head, coaxing me into a slumber where dreams were more life than life itself was. I dreamed of light. I dreamed of growth. I dreamed of the ever-yielding ideals that clung to my skin, my hair, and my feet. Eyelids fluttered shut, forcing themselves open every few seconds against the vast surrounding darkness. If I shut my eyes, dying could be the next step in my source of morning. 

But here, morning was never the sun. Morning was always the moon, cascading its soft glow all around me, when the glow was fog, when the glow was mist, when the glow was fluid existing and not existing inside of me.

My lack of sleep was dizzying. Sleep was an act I’d never understood because it always seemed that maybe, maybe I was sleeping, and that wakefulness was not a knowledge I would ever heed or find. Maybe I was asleep, alive in my own darkness, this choking blackness that brought hope of light. 

Not even closing my eyes could free myself of this lethargic vertigo. The longer I was awake, the stronger the vertigo became. Everything was moving, shifting, both around and inside of me, my gut swelling, my mind buzzing. My state was evolving, and I felt as though I would know light soon. I breathed into my darkness. Air rushed through my nostrils and out through puckered lips. My chest heaved up and down. Every part of my body tingled. There was a tugging from my stomach. It stung. Through each inhale, I counted up to four. Through each exhale, I counted down from four. Vertigo began to lift, but the world still moved. A part of me believed it couldn’t possibly be vertigo — maybe motion sickness, but not vertigo. Slowly, the paced breaths caused the dizziness to fade away. I began to fade away. I knew nothing. My existence meant nothing, so I began to fade. Blackness rose in my eyes. The darker it became, the more I believed I would never evolve. 

Two more breaths.

In. Out. In. Out.

As these breaths entered and exited my lungs, I became more and more aware of something pungent. Iron? Sulfur? Urine? What, I did not know. It smelled the way one who experienced death would smell. Of course, I have never experienced death, but I could still conjecture the stench.

Maybe this was death. Maybe this existence I knew was my traveling toward death. Maybe I was trapped. 

What if my existence had already happened?

The darkness that existed around me was the only life I ever knew.

If that’s all I ever knew, then I could have been dying forever. If I had been dying forever, then I never existed. This purgatory gave me a sense that there would never be life, and maybe this was the afterlife, maybe I was already dead and traveling between bodies.

A few more deep breaths. The deeper I inhaled and exhaled, the greater the stench became, and, in turn, the more repulsed by the thought of death I had become. I didn’t want to die. This smell meant that dying was where I was headed, even without any memory of living. My mind was separated from my body, my body a nonexistent thing in this darkness. There was no part of my flesh that existed and persisted in this stomach, these intestines, these guts. This death smell made my insides churn. Iron. Sulfur. Urine. My legs were wet, right in between the thighs.

My eyelids drifted shut once more, but rather than being greeted with more darkness, I was greeted with a speck of something in the distance. A glow. A bit of the fabled self I believed I’d left behind. It existed with me. The speck was in stark contrast with its surroundings. It wasn’t darkness. It was light — as if this tunnel did end, as if this tunnel was my death, a part of me that meant there was an afterlife.

This little floating spot must be what the outside voices called ‘light’. It had all the parameters, and glowed in a way that was the opposite of everything I’d ever known. I’d been dying for so long, and here was the fabled ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, part of this world I never believed existed. It was a part of me now, this little sliver of a glow.

The ground below me began to twist and shift. My middle was being tugged. My head was being pushed. My entire body was squirming, nowhere near the comfort of before. I was being tugged toward the light. I was dying. This was death. Screaming erupted in the dark. There was no way of telling whether those were my cries or not, as I haven’t spoken for so long that my insides no longer knew how to speak, but if I was dying, I might come to understand that those were my cries, screaming, and pain shooting through the air. They pierced my eardrums. Wind got stuck in my throat. A wind I didn’t know other than my own breath.

The light became bigger.

The speck of light stretched into a gash in the sky.

The gash in the sky shredded my reality.

I wish I had a zipper, to tie my sky back up, so I could stay here, in Purgatory, until I was no longer needed to die. The idea of death wasn’t something to ponder. It wasn’t an idea. It was here. 

Pushing myself off the ground, I ran. I didn’t know where I was running to, only what I was running from, and running away was all I could do. I didn’t want to leave the darkness. If I left the darkness, there would be no more life. I wanted to wake up, wanted to exist, wanted to become one with life, but this wasn’t life. This was death. All it was was death. If I were to exist in Heaven, in Hell, there was surely no going back.

If I was dying, then maybe I could wake myself up. Maybe I was asleep in sleep paralysis. Maybe I existed. Maybe the vomit in my lungs was the idea of nonexistence, the idea that after I died there was nothing. I wasn’t ready to be nothing, yet. 

The screams erupting in the sky shook the ground, making me believe it may open up the way the darkness had, and if there was a safety to reach. The light may not be Heaven. It might be… the place nobody ever wanted to enter, the one I never believed existed. The faster my feet carried me, the more the sky shredded into ribbons of what had been darkness, and the louder the crying became. I still couldn’t tell if it was my voice, rather becoming very aware that there may not be any running from death.

The blanket, my blanket, the one that felt like a fuzzy liquid cocooning around me rumbled, twisted, and heaved below me. It quaked, quivered, shook. It kept cracking, taking me with it. No matter how much I ran, it kept opening up around me. There was nothing. My head tumbled over itself, and then I was closer to the light, much closer than I had ever known before. My eyes closed shut, squeezing away the idea of light. As it lurched, I jumped, hurdled, and sidestepped in any which way and every which way. It was as if I was dancing in the surroundings, dancing into darkness and into the soul that would be carried far, far away from the hell I was breaking into.

Looking down, for the first time, I saw my hands, fingers, feet, and toes. Shock paused me. These were parts I’d never seen. The glow was wrapping around me. The glow was more of a part of me than darkness was because I could understand myself, seeing myself for the first time, my hands flexing, my toes curling under. I existed in Hell, but Hell didn’t seem as scary as it would. If the light was Hell, then being born in fire might help me rise from the ashes left behind. The sky ripped open more. Screams echoed through yellow light. My eyes shut against them. I squeezed my eyes shut as tight as they could go, tight enough to feel as though they would never be ripped open again.

I remembered feeling like a weight. I remember my heaviness, I remember my fingers curling into fists, I remembered feeling scared, Hell something I believed only for sinners. Of course, even those who aren’t sinners are sinners. Everyone sins. It’s why we all go to Hell. There is no more peace of us, just fire, water, and air — elements that hold this world together as it falls apart. I am water. I am fire. I am air. I exist because I am death. Every ounce of me is death, it’s why I felt sticky. It’s why I felt like a weight.

Someone other than darkness was holding me, caressing me, bouncing me up and down. I could not see. I couldn’t understand the conjecture of what was and what wasn’t. Still, my eyes squeezed shut against the vibrant light, a light that was so bright I craved asylum behind my eyelids.

The screaming and sobbing stopped.

There was heavy breathing, and it wasn’t mine, my cradle’s, or anything I recognized, but being in the darkness that was swallowing me. I was being swallowed by fire, light, and becoming an apparition. I sinned. I sinned more than most, killing, maiming, destroying what was around me, and this was my punishment. Hell was my punishment, and as I lay there, cradled by something I did not know, my heart pounded faster than I’d ever known it to. 

A sharp pain pierced through my abdomen, and I opened my eyes into bright, yellow light. There was nothing but light in my eyes, and I couldn’t take it. All my mind, my eyes, my self had always known was a pitch blackness that swallowed me, bathed me, fed me. My eyes squeezed shut again, against the pressure of what was above.

Looking around, fear was everything.

“Nurse, can I hold him?” An unknown voice broke the silence.

A breath caught in my throat and I began to cry.