Going Into Gehinnom. (Some Days it Shines Just Like A Diamond; Other Days It's Black as Coal.)

"Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone." - Rudyard Kipling

I raced to the edge of oblivion, looked down into it and saw that it was nothing. I pace along the edges, glancing every few moments into the blackness, somehow expecting something to rise up from the nothingness. Perhaps it is a memory I wish to see floating up from those dense depths- an old love, a new one, a realization, an epiphany. But, no matter how often I peer into that inconsolable hollow, I cannot help but see the reflection of my own lack staring back at me with a silence I cannot quell.

I push my glasses up my nose; I squint my eyes, open and close them again and again. I brush the hair from my face, wipe the sweat from my brow. Patrolling the perimeter of the pit, I wait for something which I know will not emerge from the emptiness. There is a vague memory of how I arrived here, of walking up cobblestone steps which shattered into shards beneath my shuffling feet. There used to be something which surrounded me but, just now, I cannot remember what it is. Everything grows dimmer, fading into the corners, taking backward steps away from the quaking cliff. I can no longer hear the birds caw but I remember I once could; that memory, at least, stays with me- those yellow-hooded blackbirds bending their eager necks and craning them up toward the sky.

The edges where I am standing crumble a bit and pieces of mud and sand slip and slide into the darkness but I do not hear anything but the echo of a song I once knew; it feels like forever ago. I'm sure that it is just some kind of delirium, but I could swear it was rising up- climbing slowly over the crag, dusty fingers clutching the edge- calling me, beckoning me back with it. It whispers, "You are weary, weary from travel. We will scale all the way to the top of the tower of Babel."

The song's singer, its writer, calls to me from somewhere out of reach and I push my face further and further into the nothingness, trying to make out the next verse, which I've forgotten. The ground crumbles beneath my palms but I am only focused on the soft, rustling sough which sings quietly- murmuring almost, "We are weary, clearly we are." My knees shake on the loose soil; I can feel my body propelling itself forward but all I hear are the sheltering words sounding out from the depths of the dusky drop.

I am falling into the fissure and all around me is silence. I can feel the shaking, the howls of his lost tribe's lament, which rings in my ears and turns the darkness into day, even as I weightlessly plummet forward, patiently awaiting a landing that never arrives. I hear the singer, "All the rails have unraveled. Babel is gone. To dust and to gravel. And the saddest of songs."