“hell is empty and all the devils are here.” - william shakespeare
“the day i held a gun pressed against my head and contemplated using it to turn the wall behind me into a “jackson pollock” painting, was the day i realized that not even death would alleviate the suffering and that had haunted me in life. the truth is, i’d always deemed hell an inevitability for me; though i never believed i’d ever done anything sinister enough to think that the nameplate for the mailbox to my eventual residence there had already been etched in stone…or steel…or whatever material the devil’s minions were crafting hell’s street signs out of. in my head i imagined them hammering out ones with some sort of polycarbonate sheeting rather than the aluminum kind i had been accustomed to. umm, anyway…i wasn’t a bad person; fact is, there were people way more deserving of a fiery fate than i, and that’s not my biased opinion. i mean if i were basing my “goodness” on the do’s and don’ts of the “ten commandments”, i knew i wouldn’t have set the curve in class but i think i’d receive a passing mark. probably around sixty percent because the first few aren’t as clear as others. i'd get a “d-”, but at least i wouldn’t be repeating the same grade.
no, i wasn’t a bad person. it’s just things that tended to turn to shit around me; or because of me; i didn’t know. maybe it was because i had been prone to making poor decisions, or because i was always placing myself in even worse situations; all i could be sure of was that everything in my life was falling apart at once. and with so many questions overwhelming me, i was at the point where the muzzle of a gun in contact with the side of my skull seemed the answer to all of them. i remember the tears running down my face, as i thought of everyone i’d leave behind if i went through with it. people who’d professed their love for me yet hadn’t loved me enough to prevent the position i was in. but i couldn’t be mad at them; hell, i hadn’t loved myself enough to prevent it either. and i recall how they continued to stream, even as i realized i wasn’t crying for those people. the tears i shed weren’t for what the loss of the relationship we’d shared would mean to individuals who’d claimed to be close to me. no, i was crying because i’d realized the truth was nothing mattered to me: not people’s feelings or their opinions; not even them. i cared about nothing…while everyone else cared about themselves. and there’s an eternal torment in knowing you suffered, having given to others what they wouldn’t return to you.
“hell is other people” - jean-paul sartre
but like i said, my death wouldn’t have caused this pain to cease; no bullet was going to change that. i was already in hell and anything coming to me after i passed would just be a continuation of the existence i was living. and with the certainty of that realized, i switched the safety back on and placed the gun down on a counter in front of me. there'd be no new artwork that day.”
sometime around the beginning of '12. just finished today. i think.
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