She had been falling her whole life. |
She was falling down, deeper into the Abyss. She had been falling her whole life. Her very first memory was of the grey darkness that was worse than blackness. Of the stone wall beside her, whooshing past the dark grey blur that was the rocks and boulders that made up the stone wall, well it was really more of a cliff. She figured that she had fallen off the cliff when she was born and that was why she had no memory of not falling, of standing with her two feet firmly on the ground, if it even existed. She thought about that a lot. She imagined what her parents looked like; whether or not they missed her or even cared about her. She wondered if she would ever stop falling and if she did; what it would feel like. Would it be any different? Would she die when she hit the bottom? But mostly, she wished it would end, this meaningless, empty falling. This was exactly she was thinking about on the day (or night, who knew) that everything changed. She was falling, listening to the whoosh of the cliff beside her, wishing sadly that it would all end. Then she had a thought. What if she wasn’t falling? She didn’t have a memory of anything else, so how did she know that she was falling? What if that was it, maybe she had died and was just hanging, suspended in one place, perhaps the last moments of her life, for ever! Or maybe she only thought she was all alone and falling, when she was really somewhere else. At this, everything started to change. The dim grey of the Abyss started to change, first going completely black and then lightening so that she could see much better. The pace at which she was falling began to slow down. She slowed down just enough so that she began to get a better view of the cliff. She could see the shapes of the rocks that jutted out of the stone face of the cliff. She could see the moss and little green creeper plants that stuck to the rocks and hung down swaying in the wind of her falling. The light continued to get brighter and brighter, until it hurt. The light kept getting brighter and brighter, eventually it got so bright that she couldn’t see. It was worse than the grey darkness. Her eyes were burning and she didn’t think that she could take it anymore, and then it stopped. Everything became clear. She was standing in a place she had never imagined before. It was a place better than what she could have ever thought up. There were...trees, standing tall reaching up into the sky. And there were...she didn’t know all the names of most of the things around her, but she would learn. She was finally done. She had hit rock bottom and it wasn’t so bad. |