To The Abyss and Back

I‘ve died once. Well, my brain did… I suppose. I was a victim of a stray bullet; found myself at the wrong place at the wrong time. Ended up taking a bullet straight through the lung. Choked on my own blood; I was comatose for a whopping eight months. Most people don’t come back from that. Usually, the brain starts decomposing in the skull after about a month. My recovery is a miracle, that’s at least what the doctors and my family called it. I know it was something else. You see, there’s something beyond this existence; I don’t know what it is, but there is definitely some sort of afterlife or something. From what I gather, it’s the place where everyone gets their slate cleaned. At least, I did, well almost.

I have no idea what I‘ve seen, but there is something beyond this life, a place I‘d call nothing other than Hell itself. It‘s a damp and dark place, to be franked I don’t even know if it‘s really any of these things. It‘s just an empty void unlike anything else out there; it‘s emptier than the vast emptiness of outer space. The first thing I noticed after the lights went out on me was that I‘m swimming in some sort of slime, or something. I wasn’t really swimming either; I was stuck in place, merely aware in a sense of being in something. If you could call it that. That’s when I realized, again, more figuratively than literally, that I am seemingly alive and surrounded by blinding and deafening darkness. Have you ever experienced something truly empty? A total lack of sensory input. Simply nothing at all. Imagine being in a state of deep sleep but aware, no, not like a dream-like in the abyss that you see when you‘re trying to fall asleep but so much worse.

That’s when fear struck, quite literally, I‘ve felt myself getting ever increasingly frightened.

“Where am I? Why am I here? Is there anyone else here? What is going to happen to me now? What is this substance I’m submerged in? Oh fuck, did something just touch me? Something just moved by me… Something moved… Hello? Anybody there? Help me. Help… help me… Fucking help me!“ All of these things were what went through my mind at the beginning of my stay in this place… this hell. I was asking myself all these questions; I was talking to myself. It didn’t help that my monologue was only internal, I was quite literally screaming inside of my own psyche. The whole ordeal just made my fear laced agony that much worse; I had gotten so fearful I felt it all over. It was painful. Yes, pain exists there, and it‘s far worse than anything I‘ve felt ever felt in my normal life.

Now, eventually, I‘ve gotten exhausted with fear, but my self-torturing doubt wouldn’t let up, at some point I‘ve started seeing faces forming in the void; faces with no bodies to speak of, they were just floating towards me, telling me how much they had suffered and begged for my help. I‘ve tried to talk to them, but alas, nothing came of it. I was dead silent, at least externally. I was screaming in my own head, as loud as I could. Then the faces got mad at me for ignoring them, and they became disfigured; they looked like they came straight out of a nuclear holocaust. They were screaming and shrieking at me with inhuman voices. I couldn’t do anything about it. I was just stuck there, frozen in fear.

My fear turned to terror when the lights came, oh yes; there were lights there too. Occasionally a ray of light flew straight above me and each time it did a demonic blood-curdling scream that sounded like it came out of ten mouths at once bombarded my years sending waves of panic through me. Then the faces got mad at me for ignoring them, and they became disfigured; Each time my terror grew worse to the point of me feeling nothing but sheer unadulterated terror and despair. At this point I‘ve tried grasping at any pleasant thought or memory I could; at first, it helped, but eventually, that became futile. I simply was too afraid to conjure up any positive mental image.

That’s when the truly fun stuff begun; once I was utterly consumed by terror and couldn’t muster the strength to think about anything other than those screaming lights. That is when I‘ve started feeling like I was being burned alive while also being flayed, sliced into tiny bits, drowned, choked, raped, torn through with machinegun fire, crushed into oblivion by the gravitational pull of two competing black holes. Every nerve ending, I didn’t know I still had functioned felt as if it was bombarded with any sort of imaginable stimuli. I’ve felt a pain I can’t even put to words properly. It’s like my atoms themselves were being torn apart and even calling it that doesn’t do it any justice.

That’s when I started feeling like the darkness was eating at me like I was fading out of existence, there was only pain; pain and this cold thick empty.

Eventually, I couldn’t feel much, other than some vestige of piercing pain; that’s when an image popped into my psyche; a noose swaying gently.

The noose just dangled itself in space in my metaphorical head.

It kept on the swaying left and right, with each passing moment I could see more and more of the image surrounding the noose. There was a pale blue wall behind the swaying noose and a small wooden stool below it. Soon enough, fear began replacing the piercing pain; it had gotten so bad that I could make out the feeling of something around rough pressed around my neck as if chocking me.

The noose stopped swaying in the center of my field of vision and an ice-cold chill swept through the entirety of my body.

I woke up to the sight of a blinding light hanging up above me, soft beeping noises showered my ear lobes I tried moving but I was stuck in my own body. Somehow, I wasn’t afraid anymore, I just felt safe for some reason.

I regained my consciousness, but I couldn’t do anything but stare at the artificial sun above my head.

After spending some time recovering, I learned I was in a coma, and I wasn’t really meant to wake up; actually, I ended up learning my whole life all over, well I assume this much, everything I know is what people told me and re-taught me. I don’t remember anything first hand before being shot; all I can remember is that I‘ve been in hell; I‘ve been to the abyss and back.

Actually, no, I‘m lying, I do remember one thing before getting shot. I remember when I was seventeen; I had tied one end of a rope to the fan ceiling in my bedroom before tying the other end into a noose and wrapping it around my neck as I stood atop an old stool.