Field Notes 3

Demons and Food

Mysteries

Not a fan of the word “Mystery.” At least, you know, in Religion.

Outside the context of a Detective Novel, the word “mystery” is, in my opinion, almost always code for “sloppy thinking.” It’s a word you go to when you’ve haphazardly mashed together metaphors which don’t make sense or when you’ve chosen to cling to a set of contradictory beliefs because you just don’t know how to let some of them go.

Nevertheless…. in this article I have to use it.

Perhaps this is Divine Justice. In my previous post, I chided Eastern Orthodoxy for being overly reliant on the word and so perhaps in retribution God has here forced me to need it.

Such is only fair.

To my credit (and discredit) though, I want to acknowledge that I am indeed using the word to paper over my own intellectual sloppiness. Very consciously so. I don’t think I was wrong on my feelings about the general use cases of the word, but perhaps I was not generous enough in recognizing that sloppy thinking is indeed sometimes the best one can do. When discussing topics like this one and getting into the deep motives behind the actions of God and the fallen angels… things get difficult. Many different metaphors and analogies come to mind, and I think in part all of them are true, it’s just that, when taken together… sometimes they just don’t quite jive. In my description of Spirits, I have fallen short of anything approaching a “systematic” theology and have instead created a theology largely based on Vibes. I think that’s okay. Emotions are another form of thinking… you just have to not expect more of them than they can give. Perhaps here we have simply reached the limits of human intelligence (at least the limits of this human’s intelligence) or perhaps the limitations of earthly language. Either way, if you ask too many questions in the comments about how some of this works… don’t be surprised if I have to retreat and take cover behind the “M” word, even if I acknowledge that some of that Mystery might be conjured by nothing other than my own stupidity.

Therefore, as always, I implore you to read with a grain of salt. As I frequently take pains to remind you, I’m not a guru. I’m just a guy.

The Lowest Thing

Q: Why is The Ocean the most powerful body of water?

A: Because it’s the lowest.

Think about it. Sea level? Lowest you can go right? Hydrologically speaking. All other bodies of water, from creeks and rivers to lakes and even the moisture locked up in the clouds of the air… all of them are higher than The Ocean. Naturally therefore, they must all, sooner or later, fall into it.

Sooner or later, they have to merge with it. Give it their energy. Their power.

The highest is never the strongest. With rare exception, this is pretty much always true. Is not the base of a pyramid far sturdier than its pinnacle? Do not your legs contain a great deal more muscle than your head? The President is but one person and, on his own, cannot do much. By contrast the citizenry beneath him, well, they number in the millions and millions. The head, the top, may direct what’s below it, sure. But the actual horsepower is always underneath.

Have you not read that the last shall be first and the first shall be last? Or have you not heard the good news that the poor are more blessed than are the rich? By such logic then, God himself, if he were to really be God… had to go to The Bottom, for what sort of God would he be if he were not the most powerful? God, The Top, had to lower himself… had to descend into the body of a peasant born within a cave. To be All Powerful God had to be humble… even had to be humbled. From before the foundation of the world it was written by this logic that God would have to be humiliated. Cursed and despised and spat upon and killed.

By this logic, ultimately… God had to go to Hell.

So therefore I ask you…

Have you ever wondered why Satan wants to be Evil?

The Apostle’s Creed

You see, there are multiple ways of getting to the bottom. There might be only one road that leads to Heaven, but Hell has many paths.

If you see a man in his thirties playing with dolls and action figures, what would you think? He’s holding them by the waist, making sounds with his mouth to make them talk, shuffle, and fly. Is such not a little repulsive? Do we not think, rightly or wrongly, that in such a scenario something must be a little off? Ah. But what if you looked closer. What if you peered a little longer and noticed that he is not alone but playing with a child. A young girl of maybe five or six, happily dancing her own dolls beside him. Now the whole thing changes doesn’t it? The sad, somewhat pathetic man whom we maybe took to be mentally handicapped is instantly transformed into a caring and noble soul.

Or consider again a woman. A woman that you see standing alone and when you glance at her you notice a foul smell coming from her direction. Upon watching a moment longer, you realize that she smells so because she is at that moment quite literally covered in poo.

An unsightly figure. Truly.

Your stomach might turn at the sight of her then, and you might jump to the conclusion that she is homeless or on drugs or not quite right in the head. But… what if you watched a little longer and saw that she was actually a nurse. That she was not, after all, covered in her own excrement but caring for an elderly man having an unfortunate gastrointestinal episode. Once again, the person whom we at first figured for a miserable wretch is revealed to actually be something approaching a saint instead.

So it goes.

You see, the homeless and the volunteer are both in the same shelter. The nurse and the dementia patient both dealing with the same diapers. Father and child are both down on the floor together… playing with the same toys.

How you get to a place matters. The Good Man or the Noble Woman in the prime of life choosing to lower themselves down into the simple mind of a child or the muck of a nursing home is, in a very real sense, at the bottom. They are humble, from the Latin “humilis” meaning, “on the ground.” For the sake of another they have set aside egoic grandeur and made themselves small. Of their strength they are voluntarily in a place of weakness, engaged in a heroic act of descent to the lowest among us, trying to help raise them up.

Noblesse Oblige.

And that is one way to get to the bottom.

The other, is to be shit for shit’s sake.

Now he told a parable to those who were invited, when he noticed how they chose the places of honor, saying to them, “When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him, and he who invited you both will come and say to you, ‘Give your place to this person,’ and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

— Jesus, Bible, Luke 14:7-11

If the nurse covered in feces is a merciful hero then the guy who rolls around in the same for fun is a weirdo and sick. By the same token, if a grown man playing silly games with children is an exemplar of love, then the forty-year-old who wants to be treated like a baby is perverse. In a sense they’ve each arrived at the same place… yes. But, the one is Good and the other? Well, the other has something quite seriously wrong with them.

And so, if God went to The Bottom and you, being an angel, had an inborn desire to be like Him… what would you do? What would you do if you didn’t have it in you to be humble? What would you become if you wanted to go to The Bottom, but not out of love for others, but for your own striving after Power?

That’s demons.

Angels rolling around in shit for shit’s sake.

Just as all men and women have an inborn desire to find love in other people, all angels have an instinctual desire to be with God. They can’t really do otherwise and, strange as it may sound, even Satan, in all his devious machinations, has only ever been acting out of a perverse desire to commune with The Divine. However, just as some Men are broken and cannot conceive of Love absent rape or abuse, so too some angels did not have enough Love in them to be Humble in the same way God was. They still wanted to be with him at The Bottom… but they couldn’t bring themselves to do so out of Charity for others.

That made all the difference.

The thing is though, no matter how you get to the bottom, there really is a kind of power there. A strength like The Ocean which sits in the lowest place. Just like the Ocean, all higher states of being must eventually give themselves over to it. Fall into it. Merge with it.

… And just think of what that must look like.

All the energy and focus and work Man puts into perversion. Into greed. Into porn. Into cheating and gluttony and hate and keeping up lies. Into fraud. Into war. Imagine all of that piling up like puss in a wound. A building pressure growing and growing… getting ready to violently burst. Those creatures at The Bottom really do have access to all that energy. All that influence. All that Power. Satan is strong like cancer is strong. He’s mighty like a Blight. Powerful in his deformity. The Devil resides at the place where everything Healthy eventually falls.

Unlike God though, Satan did not go to Hell in order to save it. His was not a sacrifice for others and, like I said, how you get to a place matters. Why you’re there makes all the difference.

Eating

Now, Misery loves company (I should know, I’ve met her) and when you get to The Bottom the way The Demons chose to get there… well, The Bottom comes with an unexpected Price. You do gain access to the power and strength of The Bottom… but only at the cost of Hating yourself. Thinking yourself ugly and repugnant and gross.

You get Power at the cost of wanting to die.

I’m sure you know the feeling.

Think back to a time when you did something you’re truly not proud of. Something wrong. A time when you sacrificed your truth and your nobility in search of some worldly gain, however small. Maybe you cheated on your partner for a cheap thrill and then lied about it. Maybe you took advantage of an old lady and sold her an insurance package she didn’t need. Perhaps you gossiped about a rival and destroyed their reputation. Maybe there’s an award sitting on your desk from a competition in which you cheated. Whatever it is, big or small, think back to a time when you got what you wanted by less than savory means. Remember it. Try to remember how it felt. Getting what you wanted felt good but… didn’t you also find that you hated yourself… just a little bit? Didn’t you also find that the person looking back at you in the mirror seemed just the slightest bit disgusting? Did you not find yourself more jaded and cynical afterwards? Projecting onto everyone else your own motivations and actions?

Remember it.

And then remember how it felt… how wonderous it felt… to learn that someone else had done the same. Or, better, that someone else had done worse. The weight… the load off your shoulders that comes from learning that you’re not uniquely evil but, in fact, graded on a curve… not that bad at all…

See, cheaters love to suppose that everyone else is cheating. Liars love to assume that everyone else is lying. Defraud somebody at work? Just business. Everybody does it. Hurt someone? They deserved it. When we do evil the weight of our consciences can become too much to bear and when that happens there are only two options to relieve it:

1. Confess it. Say it out loud and repent… or

2. Point to others and demonstrate to yourself that they are worse.

You know… “At least I’m not as bad as she is.”

That’s Hell.

That’s literally all Hell is.

Hell is innumerable souls, locked in their evil, all of them just sitting around and justifying themselves by accusing everyone else of being worse.

That’s why you don’t judge. Not, as people today seem to assume, because nothing is wrong, but because condemning others only serves to paper over your own guilt. It’s the only way the conscience can long term avoid repentance. The only way you can avoid saying sorry and trying to do better. Judging feeds your own worst impulses. Justifies them. Makes them grow.

When I was in my most depressive state I used to sit and watch videos of people dying. Horrible things. Shootings on the street. Stabbings in a mall. I would sit and watch and think to myself… “Yeah. Yeah that’s what life is. That’s all it is. Meaningless. You’re born and you die. Unloved. Alone. Maybe bleeding in the gutter. That’s it. That’s Life.”

And that made me feel better.

It did.

I was still Depressed but by seeking out that which would confirm my worldview I could at least tell myself that I was right to be so. Life was worthless. I mean… just look. Watching the misery and demise of others was a temporary step up… I could almost literally climb a little out of Hell by using their suffering as a stepstool. I could confirm and validate my worst impulses and, at the same time, assure myself that I was smarter than everybody else who didn’t see it. All those dumb yokels having fun. Smiling. They only did that because they were idiots who didn’t understand. Also, hey… at least I’m not the guy on the screen getting a bullet through his head and being laughed at on the internet while he dies. What a loser. What a dumbass. Ha.

That’s demons.

That’s how they think.

The demonic mindset is about feeding on the misery of others to momentarily feel better. That’s it. That’s the whole game. It’s vampiric. It’s parasites sucking blood.

I said in Part 2 of this series that Worship was in some ways how Spirits “eat” and now maybe you see what I meant by that. For a demon crushed in its conscience by the weight of Lust will want nothing more than for you to worship it. To admire and emulate it. If you also act like that spirit acts, if you think and behave as that spirit thinks and behaves… you will be confirming its belief system. Proving it right. You will be casting your vote for the idea that nothing matters beyond bumping uglies and that every entity in the universe exists as nothing more than an object for personal pleasure. The spirit will draw strength from you that way. Do you see? Momentarily (and always only momentarily) … it will feel better. Stepping on you, drawing nourishment out of your corruption… it will ever so slightly lift itself up out of the misery of Hell.

When Christ or his disciples commanded demons to come out of men, the demons were often afraid. Now you see why. Anywhere is better than the pit they used the person to crawl out of. And so, they would beg. They would plead not to have to return. Please. Please Son of God have mercy on us. Don’t make us go back There.

Anywhere was better.

Even a herd of pigs.

And when allowed into the pigs, the demons immediately did the only thing they know how to. They made the pigs afraid. Made them panic. Indeed, the demons made the herd commit suicide to “prove” to themselves once again that Existence and Life were meaningless and that even the animals knew it.

And for a few more seconds those Devils got to be right.

For a few more seconds they got to get high off the misery of others and feel slightly less bad.

Then… as must always happen… they sank back down to The Abyss.

Inversion - The Taxonomic Tell

The Department of Defense is chiefly the department of war. The Dollar, what most people recognize as money, is actually a unit of debt. Marriages, defined from time immemorial by exclusivity, ought now be open. Boys should be girls. Women should be men. My economics professor used to proudly proclaim that “greed is good” and the word “pollution” now means “what humans exhale”, instead of all the reams and reams of useless plastic floating in the sea. Freedom is slavery. War is peace.

The Inverted Cross is one of the primary symbols of Luciferianism.

Inversion.

The Upside Down.

Calling good bad and bad good. Reversing the order of whatever exists…

That is the modus operandi of Demons.

And, of course, why wouldn’t it be?

As we’ve already established, the real strength and power of a thing is always at the bottom. The legs are stronger than the head. Of course. Yet the head gets to decide where the legs go. In going to The Bottom for our sakes, out of humility, God really did in some sense relinquish his control over the universe. In some sense he really did step down off the thrown and hand the scepter over to his creatures. To Man. To you and to me. That you see is part of the explanation for the marked difference in the degree of God’s felt presence between Old and New Testaments. Why now, today, we seem scant on seas parting and fire coming down from Heaven. After the incarnation, after lowering himself to our level and a good deal lower, God truly did place himself in a position of lesser management. Handed over the keys as it were. Said to humanity, “Alright then. You’re old enough now. Here. You drive.” And like the man condescending to play with his children’s dolls or the woman condescending to change an old man’s diapers… it really does take a lot of strength to do such a thing. A lot of Trust and a lot of Love. Giving up control… really and truly letting go and letting someone else…

That’s hard.

Harder than The Devils were capable of.

And so what happens if you want to follow God to The Bottom but lack the requisite love and humility to relinquish your control? To step down out of the high places. To wash feet and become a servant?

Well… you seek to flip the pyramid. You Invert. You go to The Bottom but still want to occupy the highest place. You turn the world over. You create The Upside Down.

Strength without humility.

If you make The Bottom into The Top then, Hey! Maybe you get to have your cake and eat it too? Right? Maybe you get all the strength and power that comes from the lowest place whilst at the same time retaining all the prestige and honor that comes from occupying the highest?

Maybe!

Of course, as anyone can readily see by visual inspection, such an arrangement is inherently unstable. Inverted pyramids are unfortunately quite prone to falling over and the only way you can get one to stay upright is if you keep it turning rapidly on its point, rotating round and round again like a top.

… And that is why The Demons lie.

That’s why Propaganda on The News is called “Spin.”

Without Spin, without a Narrative, without a constant stream of lies… The Inverted Pyramid falls over.

Just physics.

And you see it everywhere. You hear it everywhere too. Even inside your own mind.

The Demonic, The Spin, The Inversion… it’s that little voice inside you saying that what’s wrong is actually right. It’s that little red guy on your shoulder whispering in your ear that what’s up is actually down. It’s the thoughts creeping into your consciousness about how aborting your baby because you’re scared is actually brave, or how leaving your wife would be “better for the kids” and thus actually make you a better family man. The demonic is that derailing train of logic from Pundits telling us that Safety somehow relies on us killing people and how, in order to protect our freedoms, it’s absolutely essential that we give them up. It’s that siren’s song singing that “compassion” means indulging somebody’s mental illness rather than treating it. It’s that strange logic, now seemingly omnipresent, that the only way to stop being racist is to be hyper concerned about everybody’s race.

Inversion.

Whatever is… Claim the exact opposite.

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” — Bible, Isaiah, 5:20

Strangely, this works better than an out-and-out lie. For example, if I went around telling people that the sun was blue nobody would believe me. The plain fact that it wasn’t would rebut me simply by looking up into the sky. However, if I went round instead and claimed that the sun wasn’t yellow… that it only appeared that way because the light of the sun was filtered through yellow pigments in the human eye…

Well… that sounds kind of plausible. Does it not? At the very least, if I stood on Santa Monica Pier proclaiming such a thing, I’m willing to bet that a fair number of people would believe me. Why? Because I haven’t claimed something orthogonal to Reality… I’ve simply claimed Reality’s reverse. I’ve taken the color which exists outside you and placed it inside you instead.

Clever.

No?

(Aside: Yes, I’m aware the sun is technically white but by the time it’s filtered through our atmosphere it’s yellow… everybody chill.)

By the same token, if I went around Southern California claiming that the phases of the moon were caused by the over prevalence of Type 2 Diabetes… very few would take me seriously as an Astronomer. If instead however, I went round saying that the ocean tides caused the movements and phases of the moon, instead of the other way round how we learned in school… somehow the brain feels strangely ready to accept it.

Do you see?

Deceiving people with outright lies is rather difficult. The most effective deceptions occur merely by reversing the order of the chicken and the egg.

Inversions in fact are almost always more plausible to the human mind than other sorts of falsehoods because in an Inversion the correct chain of cause-and-effect is still present.

It’s just reversed.

If we go back to the example of the man convinced that divorce (breaking up his family) would be “better for the kids” and thus make him a good family man, we can see how the Inversion process works very clearly. Even algebraically. Such a man you see is still operating within a coherent logical framework… he’s just going backwards. Reversed his signs. In such a man The Demonic has taken the following True statement:

Commitment to Wife + Commitment to Kids = Good Dad

and turned it into:

Commitment to Kids = Good Dad - Commitment to Wife

That’s it.

That’s all The Demonic ever does. Demons are one-trick-ponies.

It’s a really good one trick though, and we can fall for it so easily because, as I say, the correct logical framework of the argument is still present. All the pieces are there… just turned around. For example, The Devil could never fool a man with something like:

Commitment to Wife + Stealing from Orphans = Good Dad

That doesn’t make any sense. It’s ridiculous. The orphans weren’t part of the original equation and your brain immediately picks up on the nonsense of adding them in. Sure, Satan would prefer it if you stole from orphans, of course. But to convince you to do that he’s going to have to use some other Inversion, some line of thought involving giving to charity or something similar. Something where Giving to Orphans is part of the original equation so he can turn that logic on its head. Being a Dad simply doesn’t have anything to do with orphans, by definition it’s about being with non-orphaned children. To deceive you The Devil twists logic. He doesn’t break it.

As an aside, this is why organizations so frequently fall into doing the opposite of their stated intention. Why Animal Rights groups so often end up euthanizing the most animals, and why Cancer Charities so often seem to end up keeping the money instead of funding research. Convincing people to do something orthogonal to their original mission statement? That’s hard.

Convincing them to do the polar opposite though?

Shockingly easy.

That’s the nature of Demons.

The pattern follows everywhere and once you learn to see it you won’t be able to stop yourself from noticing it all the time. Again, as mentioned, many women are convinced that the best thing they can do for their babies is to abort them. That they’d be saving their children from a lifetime of suffering by refusing to bring them into this broken world at all. How is such a train of logic made palatable to a woman? How can we be so easily made to think that killing something is loving it? Simple. Inversion. You just reverse the signs.

Protecting Her Child + Being a Good Mother = Being a Good Woman

Turned into:

Protecting Her Child = Being a Good Woman - Being a Mother

Easy as that.

As I said, the examples are endless.

Eliminating Illness + Keeping Patients Alive = Good Doctor

Becomes:

Eliminating Illness = Good Doctor - Keeping Patients Alive

That’s how you justify euthanasia.

Or,

Defending America + Protecting Liberties = Fighting Terrorism

Inverted to:

Defending America = Fighting Terrorism - Protecting Liberties.

Voila! Enjoy your Patriot Act.

Over and over again Inversions happen and take us publicly and privately for a terrible ride. One of the few inoculations you can have against them is simply being aware that they happen, which is one of the reasons I started this Blog. Spiritual knowledge is scarce these days. It’s our duty to spread it where we can. Modern people, trained to think of spiritual things as silly be default, are almost defenseless against The Upside Down, and that is why our societies seem to fall for its persuasions almost every time. As a people, we basically have metaphysical AIDS. Our spiritual immune systems are so bad, they’ve actually turned against us, and are aiding the Inversions in attacking our own souls.

Evidence in the Wild - Demons

As with the post on angels, my stories involving demons might seem just a little bit cliché. However, again, as with the post on angels, I think there are good reasons for this. In fact, if anything I believe we should expect far less creativity and nuance coming out of the demonic realm than we should out of the Heavenly one because, once again, other than sucking you dry there’s just not a whole lot demons are interested in. Indeed, even amongst our fellow humans I think we find perverse behavior to be shockingly repetitive. As an example, the behavior of any given drug addict is apt to be more or less the same as all the rest. Crime isn’t novel and perverse behavior has never been a huge source of innovation.

At the same time though, whereas for the angel post I said that 1990s TV had made angelic encounters almost blasé, in many ways the media has done the exact opposite with demons. Horror movies, television shows about Satan and so on… they like to make the demonic out to be far more interesting than it actually is. The reality however, is that, most of the time, Evil is quite banal. Even cowardly. It’s a cautious and fearful force that only acts out in ways it thinks it can get away with. Powerful and destructive in its way, sure… but in the manner of a disease or a fungus… not in the manner of a muscular Hellboy type creature who looks cool and smokes a cigar.

Not actually what Evil looks like.

Contra heavy metal album covers and comic books… Satan isn’t actually very sexy.

He’s actually pretty gross.

With that in mind I will open up to you and share my own direct experience with The Demonic. Actually, with a specific demon. As I said, it’s not a sexy story. There’s no me running down the stairs in an upside-down crawl or having my head spinning around while I levitate off the mattress of a bed.

None of that.

Encounters with the demonic are far more sick. Hell is said to smell of sulfur because that is the scent of rotting. Of decay. Of eggs gone bad and sewer gas and burnt matches. Hell isn’t a place people go to party and have fun… it’s where you get when the insides of you start to die. When your soul starts to fall apart like a corpse baking in the sun.

If there’s anything this article can convince you of, I hope it’s that. That there’s nothing… literally nothing… worth selling your soul for. That all the promises of happiness and hedonistic pleasure the demons offer you is but a fleeting base layer of makeup on dead body. That that which you lean in to kiss will invariably have rotten teeth and a tongue crawling with worms.

A Personal Story — Despair

From the outside looking in, if you were to have observed me in the heights of my Depression all you’d have seen would’ve been me lying face down on the floor of my room.

That’s it.

As I said, Evil is banal. It’s boring. Though internally I was burning up with the fires of Hell and wanted to die, all I could outwardly manifest was lying catatonic on the carpet.

For hours.

For days.

I did get up to go to the bathroom. That’s true. But I had to go less and less because I got to the point where I simply wasn’t eating. I never weighed during this time mind you, but occasionally I would catch glimpses of myself shirtless in a mirror and be vaguely aware that I seemed to have lost twenty to thirty pounds. I didn’t bathe much. I didn’t brush my teeth. In fact to this day I still have issues in one tooth from the decay I suffered over that time. Just couldn’t bring myself to pick up a toothbrush. Felt too heavy. Everything seemed so meaningless and pointless that I couldn’t convince my body that there was ever a reason to move and all I wanted in the world was to be asleep. To be unconscious. To escape into the realm of Unknowing where the torment of guilt and sadness and despair would just be quiet.

There was a gun downstairs.

I thought often about using it.

When I did find energy to move it was often to go down to the basement and practice moving the empty revolver to my head over and over again and pulling the trigger.

Click.

Click.

The hope was that one day I could load it and kill myself out of sheer muscle memory without chickening out.

Thankfully I was never that brave.

I remember that the lights were off. All the time. I never turned them on. In the winters then sun would go down early and it would just be me, lying on the floor for hours in near total darkness, bathed in only the small glow of a nightlight on the far wall. Fears flew about inside my head like buzzards. Birds looking for carrion. I could almost hear them audibly in my ears and sometimes their relentless swarming seemed to turn into the buzzing of flies as though innumerable bugs were crawling around inside my skull making constant and incessant noise.

And then one day I started having visions.

How to describe them?

I don’t know what to say other than if you graded them on the scale of the aphantasia apple test they were experiences well beyond a five. I’d always been a visual thinker but these… these were different. Hyper Real. More detailed and clearer than anything I’d ever witnessed with my actual eyes. One night, lying face down on the floor contemplating suicide, the images started coming. Faces. Faces that kind of looked like machines. In the darkness I saw thousands of triangular metal panels assembled in layers and articulated upon one another in such a way that they could flip and fold and slide along their edges as if on hinges and inside all these moving parts there were eyes.

Eyes with retina.

Eyes with pupils.

Eyes with large, blood red veins.

I wasn’t scared. The one benefit of such a depth of depression is that you can’t care enough to be scared. I was rather just fascinated. I thought I was having the opportunity to visually observe my own mental breakdown, or that perhaps I was dying, and it’s quite possible that both of those things were true. Either way, as I sat and watched the eyes moving within the machines slowly they faded and after a while there was nothing but blackness.

A Void as if I were traveling through space, light years and light years from any star.

And there… in that darkness…

I saw her.

Depression.

I saw Depression’s physical form. She whom the Greeks called Oizys and the Romans Miseria, Misery. At the time I had no idea The Ancients had such a goddess and I had never thought to personify my distress and yet…

There she was.

Black as her mother Night.

When I saw her I wanted to kill her. At the same time though, I knew she was already dead and also that she could never die. Hers was a presence somehow defined by being less than the emptiness around her. Less than Nothing. A presence like a hole.

Yet for all that she was somehow smiling. Beckoning.

Most of all, I remember she was cold.