Do you know what pure darkness feels like? I’m not talking about closing your eyes with the lights off, I’m talking about the feeling you get when everything around you is nothing. The feeling you get when your brain no longer comprehends your surroundings and you are left alone, the feeling of pure darkness. The feeling of death.
Dying isn’t what you think it is. There are no pearly gates on white clouds, no stairs leading up to the heavens. There’s no endless sleep. It’s just dark. You feel alive, you have thoughts and feelings, but there is nothing. You try to reach out, and you realize you are nothing. You are just a part of the darkness that surrounds you, and when you try to scream it comes out soundless and voiceless, blending perfectly with the deafening silence around you. You try to run but you have no legs to take you there and no there to go to. You just hover, voiceless and motionless in a pool of pure darkness.
Then the pains start. Your mind shatters as you experience pains nothing like you have ever felt before. It feels like the darkness around you is tearing itself apart and you try to scream. The pain lasts even longer then the nothingness. You begin to beg for the nothingness to return until you can’t think anymore. It’s just pain. Pain and the tearing of the darkness until what was once dark turn red. What was once darkness turns into a blinding, searing red and you want to die but you’re already dead.
The pain lasts until your mind cannot physically take it anymore and you start to slip. Slip from sanity, slip from reality, slip from your death into something unimaginable. You slip into something that can only be described as the pits of Hell and while the pain sears at your very being you watch as fire engulfs your surroundings. You begin to see the faces of loved ones, tortured and abused. Begging for death and not knowing what death truly is. You begin to beg forgiveness to whatever there is out there and beg for this to stop. You beg until the pain and the fire has taken over your everything.
That’s when I awoke. The doctors told me I had died, but they had brought me back. They had brought me back just so I could live the rest of my life in a jail cell unless the jury decided to end it early and put me to death. I had murdered those three children after all, I deserved it. But please, please don’t let me go back there. Don’t let me descend back into hell.