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FALLING
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"And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell." - Matthew 18,9
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Imagine you’re falling.
You’re not falling out of bed or down a flight of stairs, and you don’t jump from a rooftop or an airplane.
When I imagined myself falling, I always thought about losing all sense of time. Just imagine: Seconds extend to minutes extend to hours, and your entire short and unfulfilled life passes before your eyes, with all its few glorious moments and all those memories you regret, that you would like to change.
Well, it’s too late now, you painfully have to realize, but your brain refuses to recognize the fact that you’re going to die. Death is such a… final state. And you do not yet know what waits behind its gates.
If you’re lucky, you will go straight up to heaven. And if you’re not so lucky… Well. You end up down here. Like me.
Imagine you’re falling.
There’s no ground in sight and no sky above you. You’re falling faster and faster, unable to move your body. You’re frozen. Doomed to inaction. There’s nothing left inside you but an overwhelming, crippling fear when the adrenaline has left your body… And when the fear subsides, you have nothing left.
You’re all alone. With your thoughts. The walls fly past, blurry. And you can’t see the ground because you’re looking up, and you can’t see the sky because it doesn’t exist. Not for you.
You can see your body. Your chest, your stomach. Your legs.
You can see the wind tear at your clothes and feel the coldness seep into your skin, slowly but surely, until you can no longer feel the body you can still see. Too late. There are no brakes in free fall.
First you jump and then you fall. A logical consequence. Inevitable. And you don’t have a parachute. No rope to throw out and hold on to. And even if there was a rope and an opportunity to throw it, maybe with a hook at its end that could get caught in the rocky walls, you’re still falling way too fast: The sudden stop would tear your body to pieces.
Too late. No escape. You’re falling.
Your sense of time is gone for good. If seconds stretch to minutes and minutes to hours, then what does a whole year feel like when you’re falling? Alone with your thoughts.
What will two years feel like, or three? Four?
In real life, you would have died a long time ago. Died of cardiac arrest, sunk into unconsciousness to never awake again, and from a purely physical point of view you would have died of thirst at some point.
But this is not real life. This is not the world as you know it. This is my world, and you have to get used to its laws, its conditions. See, losing your consciousness is no longer an option. You can’t sleep. You can’t die.
And why is that? …Well, I am sure you have figured it out by now.
You can’t die because you already did. You jumped, or ended your life in some other creative way. And you were just not lucky enough to go to heaven.
My sincere condolences, my friend. A real shame, because life started out so good, right? Aren’t we all born innocent, blessed with a chance to shape our life to the best of our knowledge and belief?
What went wrong, you ask yourself. What can you do about it? What did you do to deserve this? Well…
There must have been something. Did you cheat on your wife? Did you spread lies? Treated other people badly? Maybe the big boss in heaven just doesn’t like your hairstyle. Who knows?
I would never judge you. For you see… God is picky. We are not.
How much time has passed? Are you still able to formulate clear thoughts or have you already gone mad? Believe me – Madness only makes it worse. In the long term, of course. And down here, you have to think long-term.
Imagine you’re falling.
You’re falling for fifteen years.
Real years, of course. They can feel much longer to you, as I already explained.
Fifteen years of free fall and then, suddenly, unexpectedly, all at once…
You hit a hard and rocky ground.
Oh, just imagine the impact! The agony! Normally, this would mean sudden death without pain. But down here…
Just imagine every single bone in your body breaking, your organs bursting, and practically every cell in your body exploding. And all of it with full awareness! Convenient, isn’t it? Otherwise, you would be missing out on the best part.
You stay there, lying on your back, on the cold and dusty ground, unable to move even one single finger. Looking up is the only thing you can do, and now that you’re no longer falling and your body is no longer blocking your vision, you can see it.
A structure, some kind of huge tower, carved from rough stone. No sky in sight for as you already know, the tower is fifteen years high. And carved into its walls…
…are stairs.
You’re inside a tower so high your mind is unable to grasp its full extent. The stairs you see belong to a spiral staircase that winds up the inside of the tower in circles. A spiral that winds upwards and gets smaller and smaller until your eyes can no longer grasp the individual steps and everything blurs into a single dark mass.
But what this means for you, you only realize much later. For now, you’re blinded by pain and too busy feeling it in every single fiber of your body. You have never felt something like this before. You didn’t know a pain like this even existed, utterly unbearable, and you would have exchanged it in a heartbeat for all the so-called pains you experienced when you were still alive.
But you can’t exchange it. You can’t go back. This, you have to realize with growing horror.
Slowly… Ever so slowly, the pain subsides.
The bones grow back together and the organs heal. You can move your fingers again. A hand. Your arms and legs.
Eventually you’re able to lift your head and, in the end, you even manage to sit up. You look around you.
A circle. You’re trapped in a circle of stone walls and the only way out you can see is said staircase. There’s nothing else.
Reluctantly you stand up and approach the staircase. You take one step. Then a second and a third and just like that, you’re on your way. You still don’t see the great picture; you don’t know what to expect. You think that the stairs lead to a goal, but your mind is unable to process their true purpose.
It's your only escape plan: The way up.
You need no rest. You don’t feel tired. You’re alone with your thoughts and there’s nothing worse. No sounds. No distraction. No exhaustion and no sleep.
Full awareness. And again, you ask yourself: What did you do wrong? What did you do to deserve this? Self-doubt follows. And reproach. This, you could have done. That, you could have changed, and it would have saved your soul from this feverish nightmare.
You see your life through the eyes of others. You start to regret things that you never regretted before, and which are probably not even worth regretting. Is it fate that brought you here? Fate that wants to punish you in such a cruel way? Or is it just coincidence? Or a mistake, and you shouldn’t be here at all? Which would be worst? And does it matter at all?
I have asked myself the same questions way too often. But this place doesn’t hold any answers. It stays silent, no matter how much you cry or scream or hit the walls. It leaves you alone with your ever-growing despair.
And the moment in which you realize that the staircase will not end behind the next curve, and that you won’t be saved by a higher power having mercy on your soul, God for example, who comes for you and says: My bad, you shouldn’t be here, this is the moment when most people lose their minds.
Something in their head just snaps, never to return. Irreparable. Lost for good.
And you rush up the stairs two at a time, like a madman, convinced that someone is following you. Someone is still here, someone has to be, because it’s just not possible that you’re all alone. Impossible! Absurd! You’re being followed, or watched at the very least! And there must be something here, something waiting to be found, a hidden door, a hidden path, an elevator! Anything!
There has to be a meaning behind all this!
But there is none. There is no higher purpose and you know it, and a wide grin contorts your face as the tears start to fall.
Fifteen years of free fall – Stretched inside your head to centuries and millennia. How many miles does it make, with an average body weight and earth-like conditions?
And what about the spiral staircase with steps of average size and an average slope, not too flat and not too steep? A tower with a diameter of a hundred meters, roughly estimated, and an average running speed of six miles per hour, even more roughly estimated?
How long will it take you to reach the top of the tower? And when you get there, provided you ever do so, what next?
Most people plunge into the abyss before even getting close to the top, in all their desperation.
But what’s the point?
To fall anew, feel the pain anew, to stand at the end of the staircase and start climbing as soon as you can no longer stand it down there. Filled with an insane trace of hope to escape the cycle this time around.
I stood on the edge.
I stood there, countless times.
I climbed the stairs from the first step to the last, and do you want to know what I found up there at the top?
Nothing.
There is nothing there.
No door to go through and no path leading away. Nothing.
You can’t grasp the extent of this realization with your limited mind, your poor imagination. Not until you have seen it with your own eyes, felt the despair in every fiber of your being. Nothing exists but the tower. Nothing exists but the staircase. There is nothing you can do but stand still or start falling. Stand still or start climbing. And no one endures the standstill for long. Just as in real life.
There is no purgatory waiting for you, my friend. Only the tower.
There is no shared suffering among the like-minded. Among the damned. There is just this. No way out. No redemption. Because God either turned away from you or he never knew about you in the first place.
This is your personal hell.
And in your personal hell you are always alone.
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THE END