If I jump off right now, everything could end. Or it might not.
If I continue climbing, everything could end. Or it might not.
If I continue walking, everything could end. Or it might not.
It has all ended, has it not? Before I even took my first step, before I put my hands on nonexistence as I strive to climb back into existence, it has all ended. It has ended since I opened my eyes.
I thought, as I continue trodding the path of nonexistence. Or existence. There is no way to find out. How can I find out?
What should have been a bed, a ceiling, a lamp, a pillow, a life, an existence, a raison d’être, a tomorrow to look for, it has all since been replaced by an indescribable scenery.
Colors upon colors of insanity. If I look down, if I look up, if I gaze upon the horizon—blue, yellow, purple, red, blue, yellow, purple, red, blue, yellow, purple, red, colors that you would normally see and colors that would violently tear apart your retina combining into each other it would not end it would never end it would not let itself end it would continuously loop itself on and on and on and on ad infinitum even the stench the feeling the atmosphere the everything of this place if you could even call it a place it’s suffocating it’s disgusting it’s overwhelming it’s more vile than being clad in excrement and stuffed inside rotting intestines of mutilated unborn infants nowhere to go nowhere to escape nowhere nowhere nowhere nowhere—
All of a sudden, in this world of lunacy, amidst the vast sea of uninterpretable nothingness capable of melting one’s mind, appears a floating, gray, and surprisingly mundane piece of something. As I reach out toward the piece, it attempts to communicate to me.
“Good morning! What do you want to have for breakfast?”
A shrill cry. My mind grated into shreds, my eyes melting into blood, the very utterance of those sentences alone has untied the strings of my being. Every time the piece vibrates, emitting screams of impregnable cacophony, the cells in my body divide itself by infinity.
The very frequency of the piece’s vibration itself is incompatible with my existence. Every letter, every phoneme, every word, every frequency, everything has an unbridled desire to cease my being.
As if in response to the chaos that is brewing up in front of where I was, a figure walks by. Bright as the sun, warm as a campfire, it walks past the scattered atoms of me and speaks to the piece.
“What would you guys like? I don’t mind eating anything… but if I were to suggest, we should have fried eggs on toast for today.”
None of the soundwaves the figure emits go into what was once my ears. It should have been simple, it should have not been uninterpretable, yet—everything is unintelligible, and so painful. The figure and the piece, they speak in an eldritch language; every noun is a catastrophe, every verb opens a gate to oblivion, every adjective rots your flesh, every morpheme incinerates your brain.
As it seems like their exchange would not come to an immediate halt, I try my best to close what was once my ears. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt if I never listened. I try my best to create a state of artificial isolation, even if I can’t, even if there is nothing to cover and nothing to cover them with.
Not ten seconds have passed since then, yet the piece is now gone. But the figure is now approaching where I would have been, and—
It is but a split second.
My body takes shape again, now held in chokehold by the figure.
“Do as I say,” it utters, “and listen to the pieces. Never disobey the pieces. Never.”
The figure releases me from its chokehold.
Is it even valid to call it “it”?
The figure itself might or might not be me. It feels more me than me, it feels like a more powerful me, but would it even be valid to call it “me”? It is not me, but it is me, but it isn’t. What is it?
Regardless of its identity and its intentions—its very being is trying to vaporize me. It is not that it is trying to get rid of me consciously, in fact, it is not; however, its existence, its very being, regardless of intents or desires, is gradually chipping away at me.
“Who… are you?” I ask for it. Three quarters of a second after I asked, I realized that it was a mistake.
“I am you. To an extent.”
It was the answer I expected, so why did I ask? All I did by asking it was hurt myself. Every letter uttered by it chips away at my being, its voice left superficial yet painful cuts on my very existence.
Yet, there was nothing else I could do but ask. I have to ask, otherwise—this predicament will never end.
“Where am I?” I ask. I brace myself for the impact of its voice, knowing that it will hurt me.
“You should’ve known that already,” it says in an annoyed tone, as if I was asking the obvious. “This place is me. Or you. Or us.”
⁂
Every single one of my limbs is limp, a marionette with its strings cut.
Every single femtometer of my skin hurts unbearably, incinerated with the heat of a thousand suns.
Was it a mistake to talk with it—I, the I above me? There was no reason for it to hurt as much as it did, yet it hurts, it hurts so much. None of what it did was wrong, none of what it said was objectionable, yet its very existence itself puts me to a state of shame and guilt numbing enough to liquefy the brain. Its very existence itself makes me want to bash my cranium with a polearm and hysterically claw through the exposed areas in hopes of ripping out the parts of the brain in charge of pain. But there was no such panacea to give myself the coup de grâce in this nowhere.
What I thought only hurt like a mere papercut had built up, the papercuts eventually flayed me alive and pincers picked my flesh chunk by chunk until all that remained of me were strings. It was no less painful than talking to those seemingly mundane gray pieces.
All I am able to do is take a deep breath and rejoice even if for a transient moment, for it and the pieces are now out of my sight. It would be a disservice to call this fleeting moment of nothing a mere relief.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Breathe out.
Breathe out.
Suffocate myself before it’s too late.
Breathe out. Dig into the trachea with bare hands. Tear the lungs out. Force the oxygen out. Force every single atom out. Force every single subatomic particle out. Disintegrate. Abandon existence. Be one with nothingness.
But I live. I live one zeptosecond too many, and there it is.
Another piece.
The next zeptosecond, I am faced with a choice. To run away, as far as I can, wherever it might be, hopefully into existence or nonexistence and far away from this torture chamber—or to face the piece?
The choice is there, between the pain of having my entire being disintegrate as I feel everything disconnect and detach, or the pain of having my entire being disintegrate as I feel everything disconnect and detach. Difference being, the latter has someone else watching over me as I feel all of it. Or at least, I would feel like someone else was watching over me.
I approach the piece. Bracing myself for impact, I reach my hands out—
“Here you go, your food, it’s yours.”
A novemdecillion blades pierce me that instant. Wounds, wounds, wounds everywhere. A wound turns into a river of blood, a river of blood turns into a sea, a sea turns into an ocean of blood, submerging me even as I discharge more blood.
I swim, trying to close my range in on the piece.
A novemdecillion guillotine is nothing compared to what I suffered before. I have prepared for a googol, a mere novemdecillion feels like nothing but a mosquito bite.
For a second, I feel what would probably be described as pleasure. Gratitude. Happiness. Feelings I have forgotten since I stepped on this realm of nauseating colors. It is almost as if the piece is trying to make me happy, and for a split second, I could see that it most likely is.
It is but a split second.
I should have prepared for more than a novemdecillion blades, for what ensues can be described with nothing but comedy at its finest.
It—the one claiming to be me, but more I than me—walks through the water. Not walk on its surface as if it were frozen, nor swim through it, but it walks through the water as if nothing is solid or liquid but instead whatever it desires it to be. Almost as if it had turned noclip on.
Real fucking funny. And as expected, the punchline of the joke is nothing but myself.
I swim as fast as I can, feet and arms moving so fast as if I were born a lizard whose crawling is but second nature to.
As it reaches the piece, it stays in place, with seemingly no plans to follow me. What follows me, though, is its gaze, sharp as a centillion Excalibur.
The second joke—or should I say, the actual first joke—is my hope of having a choice in the first place.
You’re nothing but a burden, its gaze pierces me.
You didn’t even offer help, its gaze gouges me.
You are nothing but lazy, its gaze mutilates me.
Or should I say, I hope it pierced me. I hope it gouged me. I hope it mutilated me.
The next joke; I turn into cereal. I am now fragments of chewy protein-rich chunks and crunchy calcium-rich bits floating atop a metallic crimson soup. I wish I could compare the size of the chunks and bits to atoms or even quarks, but the fragments of me are even smaller than that, and smaller than my fragments is the amount of hope left in me.
Is it raining, or is it only my eyes fooling me? Am I crying?
Of course I am. It is the only thing this worthless self can do. Even despite being torn into pieces, I can still cry. That—is how worthless I am.
As my consciousness fades, I can feel everything shaking. An earthquake? Something permeates the air. Something. Everything is shaking, the ground, the air, the ocean of blood, the scenery, fragments of myself, everything is shaking. The thing that permeates the air is—
⁂
When I come to my senses, everything has all dried up. What was scarlet soup is now scarlet soil, something solid for my body to lay on. Somehow, my body is once again magically intact.
Was the thing permeating the atmosphere… beautiful? It is not easy to say anything, not at my current state, not as I am where I am. I don’t want to hold on to a thread of hope if it would but get cut as I climb the pits of despair.
Yet, it is only human to hope, and I could only despair for so long.
In front of me, is… it. No, not that damned figure clad in a blinding light of torment.
What is in front of me could only be described as it. It was a mistake to call the sunclad executioner “it”, for “it” refers to what stands before me. It is I, yet it is itself.
It is unsightly. No picture can encapsulate what it is, but you know it. It knows you, and you know it. It has always been there, it is you, but it is it.
And now, it is before me.
It stabs one of its countless limbs to the scarlet soil beneath, then a second later, plucks something out. Everything shakes, and once again, something permeates the air.
Despite how unsightly “it” is, the air is filled with pleasure. My eyes implode with passion, my lungs burst with excitement, my mouth vomits out rainbows and glitters as if I were a unicorn from a children’s show.
It faces me—or at least I think so, for it lacks anything resembling a face, but it for sure is paying attention to me. It opens its orifice, revealing its contents. Waves—waves upon waves of insanity, colors beyond what humans can see, sounds beyond what humans can hear, thoughts beyond what humans can perceive.
And it is exhilarating.
It gargles, emitting noise both disgusting and enticing, and though there is no semblance of speech in its noise, it truly is speaking.
“Vf vg cyrnfher creuncf gung lbh frrx? Cyrnfher, rira vs ng gur rkcrafr bs gur frys?” It asks me in a language that makes my skin crawl and my flesh churn, yet I perfectly understand what it means.
Surely it jests. Nothing can take more of a toll on my “self” other than what I had just experienced. Whatever it shows me would not be any worse on myself, surely! In affirmation, I raise both of my hands to the sky, exclaiming, “Let the curtains rise!”
As if signaling that the show only gets more exciting from here on, it wiggles its limbs frantically. The shaking and twisting movements make my skin crawl, yet it is hypnotizing to a fault. It spins, twirls, and the air waltzes in response.
In the eye of the storm, light refracts. So many colors intertwine, some I have seen and others I have yet to see until this very moment. And the catalyst of the refraction—
Was a piece.
⁂To be continued⁂
Written by floccinaucinihilipilification
Edited/proofread by Julie
