what is “hell”? i mean really. every religion, every society, every individual has a different version of their own Hell. for some people, it’s nothing more than a state of mind or being. for other people it’s the place where you go when you’ve been a bad, bad person. sometimes when i think too hard about it, i remember the movie “What Dreams May Come“. if you haven’t seen it, it’s a really good movie. i’ll be honest, i don’t remember the finer details of the movie, because it never fails to make me cry. i don’t particularly like to cry during movies, so sometimes my favorite movies go unwatched for years. like What Dreams May Come and The Notebook.
the other day i was driving over a bridge. driving scares me… driving over bridges scares the shit out of me. i’ve had multiple dreams of drowning, even more dreams of driving a car off a bridge and drowning, and i’ve had one too many car wrecks for me to feel comfortable in a car. or near water.
when i looked out over the bridge, it was freezing outside. it had just snowed the night before, and a frozen drizzle was still drifting down, transforming the snow and slush into perilous chunks of ice. have i mentioned that i hate driving? how about how much i hate winter? when i looked over the bridge, i saw a frightening expanse of gray and white chunks of ice and snow, with dark lines of frozen water trying to break through like cracks in an old plaster wall. it looked so cold.
it had the pallor of a dead, gray, flesh, and for a moment it made my heart stop. as i gazed at that expanse of river, for just a split second my mind had a brief flash of what my own personal Hell might look like.
i would be cold and naked in the frozen water. i would probably have just enough frozen water and chunks of ice in my lungs that i would feel death claim me every second for the rest of existence. my lips would be blue, and everything else in the world would be winter gray and black. my mind would be paralyzed with the cold, and stuck on thoughts of my children, not knowing where they are and how they are doing. my hands and feet would be black with frostbite and stuck in frozen claws, aching with the bitter cold.
in a few words? it would really fucking suck.
of course, at the same time i realize that if i were to ever experience Heaven OR Hell, it would be like nothing my mind is even capable of imagining, or nothing my mind would allow me to imagine until i had to face the reality of it. i think that’s probably a good thing.
luckily, my torture and thoughts of Hell didn’t last long, when i realized i wasn’t looking over the bridge onto a river of frozen ice chunks and snow… i was looking at a freaking field. a plowed field in which the wind had blown the snow over the ground in perfect mimicry of rippling waters. the actual river, when i finally got to it, was still a muddy brown and dead gray, but it wasn’t frozen. to my relief. i also felt a little foolish for mistaking that field for the river, but i was too busy driving in bad weather to dwell on it.
my imagined version of the physical Hell (because i am very aware there is such a thing as Hell on Earth, and i’d prefer not to ponder that, thanks) is going into “Fiction Friday” because i’m hoping that it will stay right where it belongs… in the Fiction section.
Continue reading Fiction Friday: Hell
