Chasm
There’s a girl that I know, who I see from time to time, and who is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known. She’s kind, generous, warmhearted, talented, beautiful, loving, intoxicating, and amazing. The kind of person that shines, and stands out from everyone around her in a way that is both subtle and overwhelming. In her I see the embodiment of all of the hopes I ever had for love and fulfillment in life: I could fall into her and be surrounded by her and know joy such as we humans never experience, ever.
In another world.
But…
In this world, we are separated by an uncrossable barrier: time. I was born two decades before she was, and so I look at her and know, based on the experiences I’ve had in life, how magical and powerful things could have been with her. She was born two decades after I was, and so to her I am invisible: a non-person who will never exist in her world except as one of those many people she was barely acquainted with and then forgets as soon as life changes.
It seems that each generation, and perhaps each human, is separated from the next by an unfathomable chasm. And those few who can see it experience only pain, for we long for that which we can never touch, hold, be, or experience, yet which we can always see, and we live, therefore, lives of ever-increasing pain.
Noted author C.S. Lewis posited that those who die in evil, or addiction, spend eternity longing for whatever it was that they did not do right, or whatever it was that they ended up addicted to. Trapped forever, doomed to watch others enjoy their addiction, or repeat their mistakes, never able to experience it again for themselves or influence the living, they experience only a never-ending pain of loss and loneliness and this, he says, is what hell really is.
Indeed I understand hell; for, although I am only 42, I feel that I am already feeling that pain and living that nightmare. How tragic for me, and for all who know.
