The Iridescence of Black

I lay in my bed, preparing to swallow the pill the old man with the flowery shirt gave me. The old has a positive reputation. People say he is a real miracle worker. I don’t know much about that. To me, he seems fairly ordinary, but I am not one to question the beliefs of others. I am going to try the old man’s pill because he promised me it would make me feel things I’ve never felt before and I’m always open to new experiences. I swallow the pill and it tastes bitter-sweet, unsurprising.

Now my body feels pleasantly hot. I feel myself in a steamy hot shower. My throat feels as if I had swallowed a whole stellar system, however. It’s stretching and aching underneath the pleasant warmth. It’s not really painful. My sensations are now mixed between pleasure and discomfort. Both are amplifying with each passing moment. The heat makes me feel as if I am slowly melting into a soup. My eyes feel heavy, so I will not open them, but I imagine my body is now a liquid. My form is a colorful liquid. I am orange, pink, purple, green, blue, red, and yellow. I’ve become the rainbow soup.

The heat keeps on increasing and now my eyelids feel light again. I open my eyes and I see colorful iridescent air blasts flying my way. Everything seems to have a color I cannot quite put to words. It’s B… No… It’s R… No… I’m not sure what to describe it as. This color makes no sense to me. It’s very alien and strange. Fairly indescribable. I feel as if my body is being crushed under this light. My body is hurting and throbbing and convulsing and spasming and crushing and freezing and breaking apart. There is a silver lining in all of this. However, whenever an iridescent air blast hits my body, everything dims out even the pain. This is good. I am going to close my eyes again because they feel heavy and I can no longer feel the rest of my body.

A final iridescent air blast slams into me and I feel myself jolting out of my body. An out-of-body experience. It feels refreshing. It feels like something. I fly, I feel myself fly and I open my eyes to see myself flying in reverse, towards the highest heavens where the old gods should be living. Something inside is telling me to not blink, lest a terrible fate will befall me. Resisting the urge for as long as I can. I end up falling so far into the heavens I find myself in the ballroom of the gods where they are dancing. I dance among these titans of old. My eyes are burning by something inside is screaming, begging me to not blink. I am at my breaking point as I dance among the ever twisting and space-circling giants clad in flame-coated dresses and cloaks that irradiate the skyline.

My eyes finally give out, and I blink.

An awful force drags me down upwards towards something I do not want to know. A terrible fog in which everything is dull and ungodly, bereft of grace and radiance. My body falls in uprightly as I find myself ascending into an old temple. It is in a pitiful state, vines are coating every visible inch of the walls and the floor. There is no ceiling and yet nothing living ever worships in the temple. A great sadness hangs over the inner sanctum. A great abyss collapses into me when I look above and I see the great gods diminished, thin, and distantly cold. The scenery of tiny distant lights struggling against the oppressive gravitational pull of which fuels my own descent into a terrible place. I unwillingly crawl back into the claws of the black hole that dwells deep within my heart. Watching the ghosts of former devotees mourning the starvation of their disintegrating gods, as I do.

As I am slowly submerging myself into plague rivers of my own making, I hear the sound of trains approaching from behind me. Looking backward, I see a legion of trains and levitate towards an unassuming car. The doors close behind me and I close my eyes, feeling myself speed away from the pitiful temple. Its speed increases endlessly and everything I see once I open my eyes is a blur.

People, civilizations, planets, stars, galaxies.

Everything is a mishmash of fading colors in an ever-lasting blackness that grows thicker and livelier. The emptiness sings, and it’s the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard. Soon enough, even time passes me by and slows down.

Now, beyond the past, present, or future, time stands still as I’m moving through what remains of the visible universe and into the cold, deep void where the tiniest quantum particles fizzle out around me as they fade into absolute nothingness.

Everything is strange, but at least I am feeling again. I am at peace again. I don’t regret taking the old man’s pill, all things considered. To see the end of everything was always a dream of mine. Now I experience it. I suppose life is worth living after all when you’re flying at the speeds that casually break space-time in front of your very eyes.

I could’ve never imagined there are so many beautiful shades of black hiding in plain sight. Now that I’m here, it’s all so clear to me. Everything is clear to me. There is nothing wrong with staring into the abyss. After all, there is nothing there, a glorious nothing that is as pleasant to the eyes as any heavenly spectacle one might witness. I am glad I’m riding this train that will most likely lead me to nowhere. I’m glad to be on my way to the place where everything, everyone, and everyone ends.

Now suspended in sheer impenetrable blackness, I feel like I am at home. The heaviness fades away and I feel myself reassembling. Ligaments, bones, muscles, and skin all fuse back together to form a new person. Organic star matter realigning to form a new me.

I open my eyes, and I find myself back in my room, laying in my bed, surrounded by the serenading darkness that caresses the entrails of my room as reality loudly shatters like shining, sharp shards of glass all around me.