Damned
It's strange how, once you're damned, part of the damnation is how crystally clear that fact becomes, how aware you are of it. Your ears prick at the low buzzing harmony of everyday life, every sign of the life that goes on around you and without you, every tick of the clock that marks another second wasted on your despair and utterly irretrievable for use in obtaining salvation. Your eyes bulge and water from the oxygen you expose them to, and it's in vain, for you won't see any light but that from the television, no saving grace but that you vaguely witness taking place beyond your somehow now unreachable window. You can feel something tugging behind your pupils, and somewhere deep inside you might desperately hope that it bears your salvation; but everywhere else inside you knows that it does not, that it is merely the incessant pull of sin that your life, if it does not wallow in it, avoids along with the good and the normal and everything else that used to define existence to you, and that knowledge is enough to suffocate that small shoot of hope.
They say the worst sinners are those who do the worst sins; the rapists and the murderers, the terrorists and blasphemers and traitors who run so rampant in our world today. And yet you disagree…and yet somewhere deep inside, but not so deep as where hope and love once lived in you, you wish with all the might you have left that you were one of them, one of the blessedly sinful sinners that might at least revel in their sins and then repent…repent and, for all their deeds' reward, be sent to that feathery castle built on clouds, the house which God built and in which he dwells.
You know somewhere, vaguely as everything has now become, days merging into fortnights and fortnights to Happy Days marathons, that you can never repent.
For how can you repent for this? It's not as if you've sinned…or have you? Or have you sinned even more by wasting away, such a waste, such a waste…surely penance would be a waste of time for you, for the so-called God who obviously does not care for you, for he has damned you to this mire of endless pillbox days and insomniac nights. And time is something you have all too much of to waste, but do not have the will to waste for good, and so just waste it all in spiteful indecision…
No, you need not repent; for God would never want such a one as you, obviously, you think, or perhaps you murmur aloud and then spend several long minutes agonizing over whether or not you actually said it.
You need not repent, for when you die, even hell would be a sweet release from this; pain, at least, would give you proof of your existence, and somehow you are sure that the bite of eternal flames would give you more satisfaction than did the quick bite of the razor in your shower, the small jagged lines that you have not even the will to complete. God. What a failure…you would laugh at yourself, how pathetic you are that you can't even successfully execute a suicide or even fully slice open your wrist, except laughs are now impossible, and the cigarette smoke laced cough that would erupt in its place would send you even deeper down the twisting wrought-iron spiral stairs of depression. And you know, somewhere, miserably, that you won't have the will to drag yourself back up.
If only death were an option…if only hell's fires, now licking on your toes and fingertips, could feast upon your open neck and end for once the monotony you fester in now. You don't dare wish for heaven, but for hell you throw open your arms, even think for a fleeting moment of mumbling a half-forgotten prayer to a half-forgotten god.
Not realizing, of course, that you're already there.