You listen more closely to the song. And you hear it—an impossible melody, and nearly as impossible to describe, though if you tried, perhaps you would say this:
Hell is always with you.
You won’t realize that until you’re looking back—until you’re in a dark and empty time, a hurting time, a ruined and compromised time in your life. You won’t realize it until you understand one day that you’ve failed, that you’ve wasted yourself and your opportunities. Then you’ll look back and you’ll see that Hell was always there.
It was with you when you made excuses. It was with you when you didn’t bother to care. In your self-righteousness and your laziness and your willful stupidity; in your casualness with the things you cared about, in your willingness to give up your own good fortunes in order to hurt somebody else; in your pettiness, in your rushes to judgment, in every mistake you regret and will always regret.
God wasn’t with you, then, if He even exists. Cneph, the closest thing to God we have evidence of, the will that made the Ash and flame from nothingness—Cneph wasn’t with you. Not Heaven. Not the Wild, not the Rules, not even, probably, the Game.
In those times when you were your most petty and small and twisted, only Hell was there.
Hell is what loves you even when you’re wrong. Hell is what loves us even when we’re bad.
And it’s fire and brimstone and poison and rotting things, too. It’s a punishment ground and torment-realm at the base and bottom of the Ash. It’s corrupting the Fallen Angels, turning them into monsters, and the human souls that wind up there aren’t any too well off themselves. But that isn’t the core of it. That isn’t the heart of it. It’s just the price we pay to have something like Hell in the world at all.
For loving the monsters were the folk of Hell condemned. For standing up for Caligula, for Pol Pot, for the tarantula hawk wasp ... did the Fallen Angels fall. Therefore it is that we are never without our witnesses, no matter how terrible it is that we may be. We are never without something to look upon us and give honor to our suffering and our mistakes. We may tumble to the bottom of the Ash, forsaken of and by all other things, and still we will exist, and still we will not fall into the Not, because there is a Hell.
You may take that as a comfort or as a horror. Most likely it is both.
There are times in your life when you’d like to cradle despair against your heart, when you want the 𝓝ot, the nothing, the emptiness of the world, anything to stop the pain. And then it’s a cruel joke that you can never be alone, that you can never get away from Hell and its poisons and its flames. But there are also times when you are lost in the darkness, and longing for the brightness, and the goodness, and you cannot find them; and in such times, there is, at least, a Hell beside you in the dark.
It is the baseline of the world. It is the darkness that reaches upwards towards the brightness. It is the fire that longs to embrace us all. It is the final company for all of us, at the bottom of the Ash;
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