Digging

Now you descend into this sinking feeling again, just hoping that the pit of despair will at least have some ragged edges this time so you might either hurt yourself enough to bleed out when you fall to the bottom or have a fighting chance to climb out once you have reached the ground. But you just keep on falling and falling, and falling. And all of a sudden it seems like a good idea to let go of the rope that you actually brought with you. That is attached to a pole at the top. But the rope seems incredible heavy now. And you know that you don‘t have the strength to shinny it anyway. And as you keep falling, you start to forget how it was to feel the sunlight on your skin, to breathe in fresh air and to lie down on the green spring grass.

And then, after all this falling, hitting rock bottom is actually a relief. Because after all this tumbling, floating and nothing around you, at least the dirt is concrete, real. It is something you can feel and rely on. It will always be there, will always halt your fall. So you lie down. And it feels good to be uncomfortable on the cold, dirty, black ground. It is comforting to feel this pain. Because it means you are alive. It means you are not just floating in the vacuum. It means that you have arrived somewhere. And you don‘t know what is up there. You don‘t have to do anything to stay here. It just is. And the blackness around you is a constant. It is hugging you completely. You cannot see anything, don‘t have to anything. Don’t have to see yourself. It is so easy.

There are some stairs on the side of the wall, but who knows what you awaits you at the top? By now your eyes have adjusted to the darkness so much that you are sure that you could not stand the light. That you surely must turn blind if you stepped out of your darkness. That you transformed into a creature of the black now and cannot be among the creatures of the sun anymore. And then your eyes adjust even more so you can actually see the pit you are in. See yourself and see what you have ecome, what you always were.

So you start digging. You must go deeper. This is not your home. This is not the final blackness. It starts to blind you, so your fingers gnaw and claw at the dirt. You are becoming so desperate to escape this burning sensation, you become frantic. Under your panick-stricken digging, the dirt becomes mingled with the blood of your fingernails. The cave echoes your frantic panting as you get more and more out of breath, more and more panic-stricken. It is all around you and mimics the screams of the madness that will catch up with you if you cannot find an opening. You hear voices behind you, from the world up there where you don‘t belong. A rope comes down, but you know, it is acidic, you cannot touch it, and they are laughing, laughing at you. And finally, there is an opening. A cold whist of air touches your face as you uncover your true home, another, deeper cave. So you dig faster and faster, and faster and finally you can squeeze through the opening. You chafe your skin and bruise your rips but it doesn‘t matter, you have to get there.

Finally, you make it. And finally, you fall.