Lost Again

Lost Again

In the mist of the old hospital, ghosts shrank from each other. The dead walked, without walking and the living built fires in the broken windows, to do what shouldn't be done in the vibe of an empty building. A grey thing heaved around, carrying a leaden ball with no respite and I briefly recognised it as my soul. What I am I doing here? said a thought without a brain. The Grey breathed a sigh, and drifted towards the fire, in which he threw his ball, but it bounced back to him temporarily flattening him until he picked it up again and moved, somewhere. I bowed with a flourish and disappeared back into me.

The people who sat around the fire passed a glow between them. It was a long white creation and burned at its end with embers. It sent them to the heights of the Universe and back down to this realm of Earth. Excellent, my memory said without a voice. To remember, is to exist, claimed a book without an identity. The earthlings looked sleepy after a while, their rebellion withdrawing. Their trespass loomed with consequence as eyes away from the hospital observed their travesty and calls were made on irritating beeping things and after spray painting and blood promises that leaked on the walls, they ran. They might be trapped, imprisoned for such affray. Their young limbs passed through the night and away from the veil of the hospital that had claimed so many, like them. Human and afraid.

When they left, Nothing took over. I was a part of it, and it was a part of me. Moaning could be heard with empty ears and there was a hellish aura I could not escape. It claimed me, adding weight to my ball, until I would give up everything and surrender. Fire would not purge it. The air would not hold it. Water weighed it down and earth compounded its weight and existence. Ether only promised to hold it. Elements could not alter it, only some secret within the heart.

It unlocked a powerful chakra, more powerful than the one that sucked souls into this vacuum, a dizzy washing machine that made no sense. On the edge of secrecy sat Limbo, and I thought that might be where I was currently. How I got in, was not clear. How to leave, I was told was an impossibility by the anguished voices of the night. The day was more frigid and cold, or summer heat drifting on the leaves.

After many days or nights that dragged into Existence, someone told me to put down my ball and I began to wander and to remember. Outside were grounds where I once walked with a young body. Across the road was a new hospital who glared at the old one, with electric eyes. A more modern torture chamber where people would be dragged around by their hair and laughed at for their luminosity. Hope was a dreary creature here.

No one wanted to go to the dungeons, except the lunatics who would pay with coins to see the freaks, who lashed at the bars and paraded the expectations. Wounded with suffering, they bore many dark souls and forgot the cold and the night, to enter into the realm of impossibility. Where one would only feel the Grey, and everything else would go away. I was such a creature.

Pain had shattered my memory. That was Limbo, a place of forgotten suffering. The dungeons were a pure scream. It permeated the whole level of black holes, the small spaces holding an individual's abyss. I had been there for a while, as punishment for being beautiful to ugly eyes. From vibrating light so strongly it blinded others into dark things. One could not wander the dungeon without extreme spiritual knowledge. Its scream so terrible that it banished everything else. Somehow I left there. Freedom, half cooked on a plate. All I had to do was tear out my hair and give away my innocence. Scream a little as they did, pretend I liked it.

Is it worth having a memory when such things happen and exist?. Did I, want to exist? Would I rather be chucked down the Sewage hole of the Universe? Forget everything, so dark that I could not be consumed by anyone ever again? Maybe I was a witch with a little poison. Maybe, the shy clouds that hung in the sky, watching, Gods nature somehow twisted.

One day, a girl visited me. She gave me a golden key, and told me that one day, on the right day I would be free. She told me she had walked a similar path and that there were many secrets tightly wrapped around me. They were caused by Doctors and nurses that maligned other souls and had longer paths to travel than mine, though all stretched into Eternity. She told me with dark circles under her eyes, that light was real and true, precious and mine. She had disappeared when the lonely children had come, sat by their fires and sprayed their grief. I remember, she was here. We all were, though voids and vacuums exist.

The key belonged to Limbo, but someone had to claim it. Someone had to. Else all would be kept in suffering, every mind tied to not knowing. Sometimes, even, it was better to know and understand, through the lens of light. To witness it and be held, not by the scream of the dark, but by the girl with the golden key.

Gold is what carries the lust of the World, but also great purity. It shines like a sun in our sunsets and gleams like a polished Moon. The one with the face that carries the World.

The girl disappeared into Nature, but the Universe knew how to build her again, into a new and improved version, and it does so naturally, so we should never be afraid.

By Maddi Smith-Nelson