I feel lost. The very fabric of who I am feels withered and tattered; flags of somewhere or something forgotten litter the crawlspace of my mind, my heart, my aching eyes. I do not know what dreams were sown into the symbols donned by those flags. There is nobody else around to remind me what it all means or who suspended them in the hazy air of my internal abyss.

Was I always this slow to think? Think, think— when did I last feel sharp or witty? Quick to answer? Was the air always this hazy? What’s causing— what’s that smell? It’s pungent, and consuming, and violent, and revealing, it’s coming from infront of me, and—it’s fire.

I walk without hesitation towards the source, one foot in front of the other, one step at a time. With every small lunge toward the flames, my nostrils are assaulted with the tasting notes of speckled embers. Hazy air transforms, with a few more steps forward, into bellowing and intoxicating smoke. Heat holds my hand with a firm grip, inviting me to meet with its master. I cannot reason with myself, not with the smoke plumes flooding my headspace. I fail to find good argument against meeting with the siren in front of me, calling for me with its light and warmth and encompassing fervour.

I release the vocal seal from my lips and separate my lips in anticipation to address the rising flame. I must speak properly, with purpose and intent. I feel like I’m engaging in first contact of an alien species. Maybe I am. There’ll be a lot to say if that’s the case. Better prepare accordingly.

My lungs pull and tighten as I perform a rapid and deep inhale—a mistake was made here. I understood instinctively that I had performed a fatal error. In my excitement, my awe of the flame, my eagerness to speak—it was as if the smoke that had been conquering the space around me had, for a brief yet tragic moment, become peripheral to me. I blundered the logic of my own headspace. Smoke wasn’t just swallowing everything around me. It was waiting by my lips. The siren song had caught me in its awe, and the smoke pushed into my throat to claim me for its master, and worst of all I pulled it further and deeper down into my lungs, I aided my own undoing! Only Icarus had flown closer to the flame than I had!

Not long after, I naturally started to sputter, and wheeze, and plead with my hands for a different death. Not like this! Bring me back to that world I knew before, with the cold! The hopelessness! I had for the first time felt hope in the warmth of that fire—hope killed me. My knees begin to dip, then collapse into a kneel. It’s even darker now. I can hardly see anything at all. I can’t see a way out of this.

The warmth transforms into a blistering, scolding heat under the blanket of smoke. I can’t even see the fire anymore, that lying fire, that kindling of hope wrapped in deceit, and—Ow! My fingers are peeling—I can’t see my fingers, I can’t, I can’t! I can’t take this anymore!

All that remained was the blinding darkness and the tortuous heat. Perhaps this was Hell. Surrender to your punishment. Embrace what you, and only you, allowed to come to happen. Surrender.

In that moment, I yielded my fate to whatever faith may take pity on me. Death took me. The pain withdrew from my flesh like an army retreating in defeat—I knew then at least, even pain is defeated in death. That was my first peaceful thought. My second thought was “How am I still thinking if I am dead?”

By the time I finished asking the question, colours started swirling where it was once dark. A little bit like when you push your thumbs into your eyeballs out of boredom and you see a colourful light show start to dance around. I couldn’t make anything out, not yet. Just colours pushing against each other, reds and blues and yellows and whites, underpinned by a current of black pushing past everything else, escaping from the symphony of colours—bellowing out of my eyelids, as if the vents of my eyes had finally opened—the vibrancy of the colours began to take form as the smoke cleared from the depths of wherever I had been in my body—detail commanded structure, and the familiarity of my bedroom delivered clarity to a poor set of eyes, and a mind, that had seen far too much.

As I caught my bearings, the frostiness that dominated the world around me had made itself known to my fingertips before whistling down my arms and legs. I was, once more, taken by the cold that I had known for my whole life. That unrelenting hopelessness lifted itself into view. It is important to understand that hopelessness has no shape of its own. It adopts the shape of those who yield to it, like a spider weaving a web around your body.

I’m talking awfully sharp to you right now. Introspective. Contemplative. The haziness that clouded my mind seems to have finally disappeared. There is something that remains. Something new. Something I failed to tame during my time in the depths.

I could feel in real time hopelessness beginning to weave the web around me. Happy to take me back to where I belong; to feel like a helpless fly waiting to be eaten. Yet something primordial had already consumed me and I had survived through faith alone, faith that in my surrender to death that a deity may take pity on me, and set me free.

The web spins around my wrists like handcuffs. Hopelessness is indifferent to the cold. They are harmless to one another. They coexist in their cruelty.

Yet now, something is different. Finally, again, I breathe in deeply, and gently exhale, watching foolishly at the centre of my nose — the warmth of my breath disrupts the frost for just a moment. A kind of heat that wasn’t present within me before now. I breathe in. I exhale. I watch. It happens again.

My thoughts return to those first few moments when I was first thrown into… the dungeon, or whatever it was, inside myself. I remember the flags littered across the grounds. My wonderings about who may have held them above ground, and what they hoped to achieve. My focus then returned to the muggy air pushing back an icey force that, for the first time, had been made moveable.

I think my apathy was put on trial when I was down there. The cure for apathy is intensity. What greater intensity is there than the smoke, the flame, the scolding heat and quivering muscles, the flaked skin—perhaps I did die in some way down there—yet when I pleaded for the divine to hold me, I only heard the crackling of fire in response. It was fire itself that placed me on trial for my apathy against the world, it was fire that burnt away any uncaring I had, it was fire that vented and cleared away the ashes of who I once was, it was—yes! It was fire that kindled a light, and a blistering heat, inside me—both of which can never be extinguished, can never battle the frost and fear defeat. The coldness of this world has become mine to conquer.

And as for hopelessness, despair, despondency, whatever label you use for that ugly creature — I will say only this: find me a spider’s web that survives against even the smallest flame, and I shall submit to you again. Until then, I will carry my flame, and I will hold onto my ridiculous hope, and I will conquer what was once invincible.