Auditorium 4

I stood alone.

No sounds, no sensation to account for.

A auditorium made of rock encircled me, with stone pillars spaced out systematically in every direction. The whole area seemed to be expanding and contracting, like it was breathing. The vastness of it, pressing upon my whole being.

I couldn’t move.

Everything appeared cold.

The ceiling was made of violently moving clouds, pregnant with lightning, hanging in a stasis, crackling in the folds of the clouds moisture. The floor beneath my feet held no colour, light, nor shadow. My eyes strained to see some details, or gain some clarity about what was happening, more so, what had happened to me. In the distance, or... only feet away from me, a vague outline of another person fazed into existence. The distance was hard to gauge, I felt strangely intoxicated, yet acutely aware. I could see that it was human, yes, but with no discerning features. Just a fuzzy grey outline, inferring a human shape.

I yelled at it.

No sound came out of my throat.

Bent, my head screamed within itself, hollering obscenities and praying loudly for release. Yet my mouth did not move… I was frozen in space and time, as my mind maddeningly played on.

Desperately I tried to remember how I got here. Nothing about this place was recognizable, and the stillness that permeated everything, including my body, was alarmingly unnatural.

I searched my mind for my last moments, and remembered kneeling in my garden, wearing my favourite leather boots. Boots my boys had got me for my 50th birthday. I wore them everyday for nearly 7 years, before the laces began to tear through the holes previously occupied by copper grommets. I was humming my favourite part form Mozarts Lacrimosa, crouched over my seasonal vegetables, when a dull pain spiked up the back of my left arm.

I wasn’t breathing.

Shit, I’m dead... and I know where I am.

But why was I here?

I lived a pretty full life, I loved and supported my children, provided for my family, never complained and I always did as I was told. Yet here I was, weightless and burdened with only one question: Why purgatory?

With this realization, more human shapes came into focus. All having the same faded grey outline, suspended throughout the darkened auditorium. My eyes darted around as more bodies appeared. Flashes of light came from the storm clouds above, exposing the horrid detail of each face. Wretched faces, twisted in fear. It was certainly shocking, although I had no reaction. I was glaringly aware of all that surrounded me, but I had no feeling, no way in which to express the knot of kinetic energy brewing in my lower abdomen. Alas, all I could do was be a witness.

Well, look around... or be forced to look at my regrets in life.

When I closed my eyes to the horrors of my new environment, flashes of my contrition, the many times I chose someone else over my own needs, replayed over and over at nauseam. With no emotion, I observed only my failures.

After watching my ‘coming out’ to my parents, and then agreeing to reprogramming camp, for what seemed to be the millionth time. I forced open my eyes to one of my fellow inmates vibrating. So fast it was hard to tell at first, but the flutter was close to a hummingbird and had caught my eye. I watched as they resonated furiously and in a multicoloured flash, disappear into the nothingness. It was the first time I had witnessed any change of residency of this morbid place, and that angry knot of energy, raised in vibration ever so slightly in my guts.

There is a way out of here.

A way out of this horror.

I was either haunted by the ghosts in my mind, or by the souls that surrounded me. There was a fleeting moment where I believed I was in hell, but without a range of feeling, emotionally or physically, that theory was quickly eradicated. Only the magnetic churning in my bowls remained.

What I knew is that I could not stand a moment longer, so I attempted searching within me, and grasped at solutions staring into the darkness. Only the array of hovering bodies, was too distracting. I closed my eyes to think, and I was throttled back into a painful memory, only this time it was my mothers death. I wasn’t allowed to think, that much was obvious. So I surrendered and allowed the pantomime.

This time the ball of tension was not relenting, but growing. A new feeling was cursing through my veins, although I couldn’t connect to its source. My whole body was vibrating as I recalled: Walking up to my mothers casket and not crying, not responding to the great loss I felt in my heart. I was there looking down at her still body, mine, screaming in resistance. A tear fell from my eye, and splashed against her cheek.

This never happened, this was a new reality, brought on by my current circumstance. I was crying for me, my loss, my life. I was finally allowing a feeling and changes were following in kind. All my regrets came flooding back to me in short bursts. With each regret, I cried, and opened further. I refused reprogramming camp, I told my children I was gay, I divorced my wife when she asked... each regret changing in my heart, as energy coursed feverishly though me.

The force was shaking the space around me. I had opened my eyes to something new, not a shadowy auditorium, but bursts of light and colour. The energy didn’t slow, only changed direction, and now my whole body was preparing for lift off. I jettisoned upward, ranges of feeling returning to my body.

Tears of joy sprung from my eyes, I was elated to be free of the monstrosity that was purgatory, and happily welcomed any new feeling, knowing now that it was only regret, that truly haunted my soul.

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