I have perished more times than I can remember. Which probably seems like an alien concept to a lot of people. I have good news though, there’s not only an afterlife, there are innumerable afterlives as far as I can tell. I never remember them for long, but I always write them down shortly after returning, as I tend to forget them as I often forget the way I perished. I’ve collected roughly 83 journals so far, but I don’t know if that’s all of them. The bad news is that more of them seem horrific to a living human than comforting. I don’t know what to do with all of this information so I decided to start transcribing them
Afterlife Journal 23:
I remember a pain in my back and the feeling of cold tile against my face as things faded not to black but to a collection of fractalized light that shone at a distance, pulling at my navel, tearing away some essential component of my very being. I struggled, hands that I could not perceive but surely belonging to me holding tight to my immobile body, as eyes closed and light grew. A great cacophony of buzzing cicadas grew in my ears louder and louder the more I resisted the call of that light. It grew in intensity and strength endlessly til it was all that encompassed my thought, and soon numbness gripped my own spectral hands and I was pulled with rapidity to that swirling light.
The distance was incalculable and the amount of time I spent being reeled towards it seemed to encompass an aeon itself. I allowed my soul to drift, trying to hold on to the vestiges of my humanity that seemed to float away into the darkness around me. Now free of my corporeal body I could remember the afterlives that had come before, and each one that I had escaped. I remembered the most important thing about dying, and that was the loss of one’s individuality. There is something incompatible between the material world and the worlds that come afterwards that are not conducive to human thought and individuality.
After sometime, struggling to hold on to what I could of my humanity I felt myself finally breach a barrier, the feeling not dissimilar to breaching the depths of the ocean back into open air. The pulling in what used to be my navel ceased and I floated forward into a black void both over and underpopulated with shining lights. I was not able to perceive any component of what new form my soul had taken, though my perception was obscenely acute. I could see and hear everything at once, and for a time that surpasses measurement I was accosted by the din and the lights. I don’t know how long my new senses were assailed by this horrific overload but it was far longer than I would have preferred.
In time I found myself finally capable of distinguishing the nature of things. I perceived others near me, others that were like me in a way, though not exactly of human origins by my measure. I could hear them, or understand them at a glance. Multi Colored orbs who’s colors were words and spoke in screams and whispers of horror and confusion, and others that spoke of peace and rest. Though speech is probably not the best word to explain their expressionism, it is the closest one I could use to describe how they communicated.
I looked past the collection of new arrivals, who blinked into my periphery at a concerningly rapid rate and peered into the rest of this chasm formed of darkness and light. I saw, in the distance, a long line of orbs, bleached of all colors sitting mindlessly not far off. They seemed to be waiting to enter a large tree-like object that shifted its colors and form rapidly, but a door near the center of the object stayed ever present. I watched as the bleached orbs, which were presumably intelligent creatures, wandered mindlessly one by one into the tree, and made no sound as their essence was flung high into the darkness above upon entry to the tree. I stared, confused as the soundless orbs began shooting out of my line of perception. They were propelled into the darkness with neither sound nor emotion crackling across their orblike forms, and the humanity I retained shuddered to wonder where they were going and for what purpose.
A sound like pieces of chalk cracking against each other sounded and pulled my attention away from this horrific treelike fractal, and towards the giant maw of some creature far beyond me to explain. The best that I could describe is that it was like an angler fish, but only the front of it. It’s monstrous and gigantic head snatching up several new arrivals and disappearing in a rainbow trail of fractals. Though the creature seemed to be without belly or bowels I could see the orbs it had snatched following without will as the creature descended and swam away, the colors crackling across the orb’s unbleached surfaces screaming in vibrant hues of red and orange and then suddenly they were dyed black, and ceased to emote in colors or sound. I shuddered and panned my perception around frantically, seeking some sort of shelter from such a gigantic abomination.
I eyed the tree, and saw as a few more souls were shot up into the darkness above from its mass and decided that would not be a direction worth traveling, and with some effort, oriented myself and began propelling my new form with all the speed I could muster in the other direction. Finding myself ceased by a face that should not exist. At first, it appeared to be that of a beautiful woman. Its features are fine and soothing to my troubled mind, but after sometime the face was not only that of a woman’s, at least not just a human woman’s. In time it took a more sinister shape, a shape that showed an oddly geometric head that twisted in on itself, a multitude of eyes the only unmoving feature on its incalculably large head. I felt and perceived large bony hands with a near infinite number of fingers raising me up to eye level as we rocketed high into the darkness.
I peered around as we reached the apex of this being’s ascent and saw that I was not alone, several other entities of similar shape and structure were also pulling other intelligent orbs up, and they were forming some kind of ritualistic circle. A raucous cacophony of cicada song filled my being and the only word that I could make out was “cleanse”. The sound took form and crackled like lightning into my very soul and I felt as each crackle attempted to wash away what I had brought with me. The few memories of my life, my desire to leave, my identity, and so much more were being pulled and erased from me. I had no hope of escape and feared for the loss of myself as I endeavored to defy the power of these otherworldly cleaners. I layed there, in the incomprehensible hand’s of this entity and waited for myself or time to allow me passage from this torture of the soul.
I know not how much time passed, but surely it must have been a significant slice of eternity before I felt my being drift from the cleaners hands, and I looked around at the fellow souls who had been also carried by these beings. Many of them were now completely white, and their orb like forms no longer sang with color. A few were able to mewl out quiet protests and fears of unbeing, confusion and above all else, nothingness. Whatever they had brought with them was gone. I too felt this, myself weakened and scarred by the experience. I tried to take count of my own faculties that remained, and found much of myself eroded, gaps in the humanity I struggled to retain rang as obvious to myself. A growing pang of fear as I felt my soul’s mind jump over chasms where memory and personality had once lived. I knew only one thing for certain. I had to escape this place.
I stayed motionless for a while and saw as the yellow light of fear emanated from myself as some of the now bleached soul’s wandered off towards that nightmarish treelike thing. Some merely sat there, though. Not enough will to move in any direction, merely broken and lost. Far off I heard that sound of chalk grinding against itself approaching and took flight in whatever direction got me away from what I knew was coming. My soul began to ache and sting as I traveled in between swirling and alternating shapes til I found myself running through what appeared to be a market. The stalls and the street were amorphous swirls of fractals that vaguely implied some form of sentient construction, and I could see a tumult of souls around me going about their business. They, unlike many I had encountered thus far, were not bleached completely. They retained traces of color and sound, and flashed and called out in fractured personalities.
I did not know how I arrived here, but for a moment I allowed myself to rest. I attempted to soothe the burns and scars along my soul, but found the effort futile, this pain was not a pain of the body to be iced or numbed, this was a pain of the self. A pain left to linger from the incomplete cleansing that I had received, and I saw that pain reflected in the denizens of this area I found myself in. The colors and songs they projected were merely fractured components of a whole. This was no market, it was merely where souls like me wound up. The ones who resisted resided here in a facsimile of waking life. A grand illusion meant to keep those who resisted the cleansing; in one place. A familiar or appealing place for the weary, near broken souls to take comfort.
It was no sooner than I realized this that I finally could hear a sound that hummed about the place above the songs and colors of the broken souls. This place had something like a heartbeat, gigantic and fearsome it roared, and from out of the darkness above I saw its green multifaceted tendrils descend. It was by mere chance that I had moved from my place of respite as one crashed into the fractal bricks below me and the pushes it made, began to make a noise not unlike a thousand suckling things amplified a thousand times. The noise was disgusting and filled my perception. I saw as the yellow and red fractals of the brick work were dyed a nauseating green as the yellow and red climbed the tendril. I looked on and around in horror as I saw the fractured souls of this location dyed green and become a shade of their former selves. I watched as their own colors drained into the tendrils and shot up into the sky, fading with fractured screams and howls for help. I knew I could not help them, I only knew that I had to find it. I had to find the door. There was always a door, and I began to flee again.
I traveled for an amount of time over the makeshift settlement in the darkness and eventually I found myself somewhere. The darkness of this world soon gave way to what looked like a limitless ocean invisibly damned up against the bright lights and darkness of the world I now inhabited. Deep blues and purples leaked visibly from this ocean-like structure. Within the ocean was shining pinpoints of light I could not identify at first, until a fractured part of me screamed out “stars!”.
I remembered them now! Stars! Bright balls of gas in the sky. Then focusing my vision I could see the door, a shining prism of something physical. It looked alien to me, as I had been living in this world for quite awhile now, and the concept of material being was not commonplace. A dread had washed over part of me, just being close to anything material. It seemed to me, at this point, to be unnatural and not to be trusted. Every part of my fractured humanity screamed out “hope!”. Then in a moment that hope was snatched away. I saw a small soul whooshing across the chasm between where I was and the door and watched as monstrous appendages shot out of the chasm and grasped at the fleeing soul. It was tenacious and fought and slipped the grasp of claws, pincers and tentacles alike, but eventually it was stripped of what remained of it’s color and plucked and prodded over and over, as a haunting song like laughter filled my being.
I felt my yellow glow brighten. I was horrified, watching the small soul screaming and crying for what seemed like an impossible amount of time. But I found myself soon growing red, with the feeling of rage and passion. I had not traveled this far to be turned away at the gate, and steeling myself I flung towards the prism, traveling over the tormented soul that had tried to pass before me. Racing higher and hearing the hideous song of laughter grow as I perceived the slick black appendages racing out of that chasm between worlds toward me. I did not know how to dodge them, I did not know how to speed my escape, but I knew of one thing I had. I had the strands of humanity I had held dear to myself in hopes of escape. The appendages grew closer and surrounded me almost forming and impassible blockade around me, and with one last fearful gasp of desperation to be saved from this incomprehensible perdition, I blasted out the song of my humanity, sundering almost all of it into the void and propelling myself with intolerable speeds towards the prism. I barely squeezed between a gap in the clutching things and then was embraced by darkness upon striking the doorway.
I felt pained, cold, and groggy. Awaking on a hard surface. Which I soon came to recall as my floor, and pried myself up from a sticky and wet puddle of dark hue. It took me some time to get the hang of walking with legs again, but I was able to eventually work my way to a drawer and retrieve my journal, and I began writing, scribbles at first eventually gave way to words, as I felt my soul and body finally reconnect. All that my brain had memorized in life came flooding back and eventually I penned this recounting. I will add this journal to the growing pile that seems to outline the multitude of afterlives I have lived. I never remember them long, and they fade before I next rest my eyes. I do not know how many more times I will be able to escape the afterlives that await us all and I have no excitement to experience more afterlives. But as long as I can, I will remain too fearful to be barred from my mortal coil