On The Matter of Sight

When I opened my eyes, I couldn’t see, but I had a feeling deep inside that something was watching me. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak, nor could I flee. Yet, I had known there was an unstoppable horror, and it was coming for me. There was a darkness blacker than anything seen by man, so violent, so cruel, so pernicious. Until now, it has surrounded me, enveloping in its blinding rays.

Horrific emotion gripped my form as I struggled to make left from right, but nothing seemed to be in place. Nothing was as I knew it. Nothing made any sliver of sense. Everything around me is a burning, bright, unbridled monotone. The void personified. It is the abyss incarnate. A place in reality that shouldn’t exist on the sheer scale of its monochrome shape and endless expanse.

I moved around, but nothing seemed to change. Something suspended my body in perpetual darkness. Floating inside the nothingness, so to speak. The feeling of being watched only grew stronger with each passing moment. The horrific feeling inside turned into paranoia as I threw my gaze this way and that. Nothing ever changed, nothing ever shifted, nothing moved. For the longest time, my eyes burned with the bright and unforgiving darkness stifling me. For what seemed like eons, my ears rang with a terrible static noise burning itself down to my spine, making my skin crawl like the marching of centipede legs.

The moment everything changed can be described as the most gut-wrenching moment of my entire life. I leaned against a particularly reassuring part of a wall that seemed to stand out from the rest of the unrelenting gloom. I was looking for some solace in the wall that seemed to be the only real thing besides me in that unreal space, or lack thereof. The moment I dared press myself against the beacon of realness in an ocean of nonexistence, a plasmoid mass stretched itself out of the wall and took the shape of a clown-colored serpent with a surprisingly human face. The plasmoid began banging its psuedohead against the nothingness and screaming at me to go to sleep. Bright, perpetually open eyes encircled by darkness stared into my soul and a mouth impossibly wide stretched into a vengeful, perverted smile locked me in place as the thing made its insidious demands. I remained there, staring at the intense commotion with a fading sense.

Everything had turned infinitely worse since I’m inclined to say. Now there are bloodshot eyes clustered together, peering at me from every direction I look at. They seem incredibly cartoonish yet realistic beyond explanation. A serpentine Walrus keeps me company now, whispering odd numbers into my ears with a pleasantly deep and reassuring voice. I like his presence. I genuinely do. Sometimes he fades into the background and then the unimaginably violating horror of the perpetual darkness returns. My mind cannot handle the constant presence of faceless men in black suits and their human-toothed dogs.

Right now, I am floating in the ever-revolving and shifting center of the lecherous void that envelops me. My eyes are now missing, my throat has been torn out, and my eardrums punctured. I am truly alone and defeated. Yet my torture continues unimpeded as I am still surrounded by a chain of eyed wheels who are adamant on peering into the depths of my shriveling soul. I have not hurt myself, not in the slightest. A vicious band of human-sized numbers with arms and legs attached to them assaulted me. They were screaming and shouting their value at me as they beat and tore into my flesh until all I could feel was their value being burned into me. Eight hundred. Two hundred. Thirty. Fifty. Eight hundred. Forty. Ten. Ten. Eight. The numbers seem familiar, but I do not know what they’re supposed to mean.

On the matter of sight, I think me having my eyes gouged out was a good thing. Now I can no longer see the violent, pernicious, torturous darkness. It can no longer burn itself into my hopeless and pitiful retina. Being entirely honest with myself for a moment, having eyes, having sight is being locked in a cage. There is so much the eyes perceive wrong. Now that mine are gone, I can actually see everything for what it truly is.

Over the course of my infinitely unbearable time swimming and swaying in this unrelenting emptiness of vast nothing, I have finally been able to piece back what my last moments of normal were like. It was late in the night, and I was browsing the web for scary stories and gory images when a pop ad appeared on my screen. Something about finding an escape from the monotony of the nine-to-five life. A virtual adventure that is guaranteed to scramble one’s senses and reinvigorate their will to exist. The lazy aesthetic and the ridiculousness of it all convinced me to play along. Not thinking much of it, I clicked on the ad, assuming it was some harmless spam scam attempt. Clicking on the window let me to a black site. There was nothing but a title in a massive white font “WELCOME TO A GLIMPSE OF PARADIS” with clickable tags titled “Enter” and “Leave” below it in an inky red font, pulsating slightly. I clicked on the “Enter”, and the page reloaded, going blank for a moment before it reset itself, revealing a text box with a series of numbers that seemingly had nothing to do with one another. Below the numbers, a text said, “type in the hidden message in the numbers to gain entry into Heavn.” There was a timer below the text box, and it went down. I couldn’t figure out the meaning behind the numbers, quite frankly, I don’t remember them now. I remember the timer glitching when it reached six seconds. It blinked the number six three times and then counted down to zero, after which the page shut itself off, displaying a 404 error. No matter how many times I refreshed the page, the error remained. That was the end of it though, as I couldn’t find this page anywhere online. The rest of that night was incredibly dull, and I fell asleep as usual sometime around three in the morning.

Maybe all of this is just a figment of my imagination. Perhaps it’s merely a mirage. It might even be just a cruel joke my mind has played on me, on you, on all of us even. Or maybe, just maybe, everything I’ve said until this point is nothing but a cruel lie. A lie devised by weak eyes that see things that aren’t there and cannot notice the obvious right in front of them. What if the nothingness in front of me is the reverse of black, what if the burning sensations on my skin and inside my throat result from a fire engulfing, eating away at everything I am. What if everything I had described is actually in reverse of what it is? Quite possible. Here the emptiness is a shiny, blinding shade of light that spins and crawls this way and that in odd directions and shapes. In this place, it consumes everything, whence you and I are a pulsating part of this untouched pit. This forsaken room, which rests beyond forgotten halls, is darkness redefined.