You open your eyes.
You see nothing but the darkness.
You feel nothing but the void.
You hear nothing but the silence.
You smell nothing but the emptiness.
You taste nothing but death.
You realize the heavy realization far too late but that doesn’t stop the shock from hitting you like a truck…
You are dead.
A pathetic end to a pathetic life…
All those dreams of grandeur, all those ambitions, all that…hope and where did it lead you in the end?
In the same dark and cold place, you saw others fall into.
The same dark and cold place, you never thought you would find yourself in.
The same dark and cold place, you thought your ‘God’ would save you from.
The same dark and cold place, you ignored till the end was nigh.
Perhaps, if things were just a bit different, maybe, just maybe, the countless people whose lives you took with your own hands would still be alive and not be here with you, trapped in your own hell.
How else could you explain the loathsome gazes you felt on yourself?
You wonder…how it ended up like this.
It was all going so well…
You and the Believers had almost beaten back the Heretics back into the darkness.
Then where, just where did it go wrong?
Where did you go wrong?
Why did your fellow Believers betray you in the end?
Why did…did you die?
You were supposed to live a long life, spreading the word of God to the pious and cleansing the souls of the sinners in the divine flames of Heaven.
You were supposed to be the lone pioneer of a utopia that would encompass the entire world.
You were supposed to die a meaningful and a peaceful death, not…not fed to the dogs like a goddamned savage.
You couldn’t help but feel wronged, oh so very wronged. By the Heretics, the Believers, humanity itself, and even by your God.
You blamed everyone but yourself for your own demise.
You couldn’t even consider the thought that it was you who was in the wrong in the end, because how could such a virtuous person as yourself ever be wrong?
So…you festered in your hatred…though it would accomplish nothing, not now nor ever.
You did not notice when you started seeing their dead and lifeless eyes.
You did not notice when you started feeling their warm blood dripping from their cold bodies.
You did not notice when you started hearing their screams of agony.
You did not notice when you started smelling their burnt flesh.
You did not notice when you started tasting their blood.
You did not notice when you became the slave to your own hatred.
Only after a long, long period of time does your hatred loses its iron-clad grip on you and fades away, leaving naught but a cold void inside your soul.
The sudden silence from the maelstrom of stimuli was peaceful yet…wrong, oh so very wrong.
All the hatred you felt simply vanished into the void.
In that essence, you had started becoming the void and the void, you.
“Still, there is time to reminisce. Perhaps now I might be able to look at myself and my actions with a more objective perspective. Perhaps, the answer to my question lies in my past alone.”
And that’s what you did…
You take a look back into your hopes of childhood, your dreams of adolescence and your ambitions of adulthood.
Now through the lenses of a dead soul who has accepted their fate, you look back at all these stages of your life, all your memories, and all your interactions with other people but most importantly-at how pathetic you truly were throughout your entire life.
You realized that all your life, you never once dared to stare into the abyss.
You never once dared to break the Commandments told by the God you once believed in.
You never once tried to understand the people you blindly labelled your enemy.
You never once tried to…be a human.
From this realization onwards, you started feeling as if daggers were being glared deep inside your soul.
A human living out their entire life without a shred of humanity…isn’t that the most pathetic way of living out your life?
Your entire life, you lived like a puppet with nary a thought nor an emotion that was actually your own.
You thought yourself to be the peak of humanity when you were alive, the savior of all but now you realize they were just delusions you made up to give purpose to your life, to try to fill up that void in your heart that had always been there, waiting to consume your entire being the right moment…and that’s what it did.
You gave into the void mere moments ago before your death.
You lost faith in all that you used to believe in.
Maybe, just maybe, if you continued having faith till the end and even beyond, you would be resting in the bosom of your God.
You know well enough that having such thoughts would do you no good but there was still time left so might as well entertain the possibilities of what was and what could have been.
The hate-filled eyes that were glaring murder at you curled up in disdain at your self-pity.
The more you think about the unchangeable pasts, the unthinkable presents and futures that would never be, the more your regrets grew.
You regret not questioning what should have been questioned from the very beginning.
You regret not allowing yourself to think beyond the box of religion that was forced onto you since infancy.
You regret not keeping your mind open and your heart alive while you still had the chance.
All these regrets, all this sorrow, all this despair…
It all feeds into your endless loop of self-pity and hatred.
The loathsome gazes take up the entire void now.
Their hatred towards you is the most apparent thing in existence.
Your hatred towards yourself is the most apparent thing in existence.
You wish you never existed because you knew you never deserved to exist in the first place.
And the void granted you your wish…
You have now completely ceased to exist.
You are now truly, truly dead.
Hatred
Sorrow
Despair
Pain
Regrets
It all leads to the destruction of one’s soul.
The void that is the afterlife is naught but a part of the machine that regulates the cycle of life and death.
It strips a soul of all its individual identity.
It resets it back to zero.
There are only a finite number of souls in this plane of existence.
Hence, it is essential that all souls return back to their original state so they can be assigned a new flesh to occupy.
But what happens if one’s soul is so strong that it refuses to be cleansed?
