Sometimes I get bored of sitting in this big house all alone with nothing to do but keeping myself alive, with only one form of entertainment, gazing at myself in the walls and roof, as they all made of mirrors. So I leave the security of my home and venture into the woods surrounding it.

The trees without leaves closely circling the house, or fencing it to be more exact, were of a light grey color: dull milky silver and they had small white or black dots sprinkled randomly on them. The further you go in, the darker the trees get, and the more black dots there is until there are only black trees, reminiscent of burned ones.

A thick layer of ash covered the ground, like disgusting heavy snow from an especially cold winter night, and it also gets darker in color the further away you get from the house until it becomes essentially black snow that sucks out even the light from the sunless white sky above.

I learned from someone I don’t know that well, or even remember in fact, that the black part is the worst part, and it’s basically the equivalent of hell in this world that only consists of one house made of mirrors in the center of an endless stretching forest of grey, and an unreachable faraway horizon of pitch black.

Unreachable is too strong of a word, you can actually enter the darkness, but you can never reach it by walking. You see, I was told that the darkness is an ancient unstable part of this world, but it should’ve never been, so the distant black trees is nothing but a mirage created by this world to give the formless a clear, awe-inspiring form that could not be touched, as a warning and message: ”Don’t touch the darkness.”

But, that doesn’t strictly mean that it doesn’t interact or affect this world.

When the trees’ color reach the perfect yet subjectively unappealing balance between pitch black and pure white (and that’s the only place you can actually walk to, as the woods start stretching from this point onward), they start to randomly and infrequently appear: seemingly bottomless pits of tar that’s as unstable as its source, as it’s sometimes boiling hot and sometimes freezing, the physical manifestation of coldness and heat in a liquid bubbling form, fighting for supremacy. They are the only way the darkness interacts with this world.

As I was idly walking around the woods with no care in the world for the god knows which time, I came to an immediate halt to these simple, basic yet surprisingly hard to answer questions.

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Why am I here? How did I even end up here?

I stayed there frozen for a good moment before gazing up at the milky white sky. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, and I turned around to head back to the house, I felt something deep inside me urging me to return to its safety: something primal and instinctive.

As I took the first step in its direction I felt nothing below me as if the ground disappeared, I couldn’t believe it, it actually did.

The only thing I felt or thought of less than a second later was pain: I felt like I was being burned to death, then a moment later I felt like I was freezing to death, and the cycle continues. What immediately followed was an imprisoning sense of heaviness; I couldn’t move freely, or even by that much, it was like being submerged in incomparably heavier water

Black. No matter where my eyes raced in a futile attempt to find an escape; they looked up, they looked down, they looked in every possible direction, I even turned around, but they saw nothing but pitch darkness. I knew then that I was in its Tar.

It’s burning. It’s freezing.

I want to swim up to freedom but when I look up I see only darkness, is there even an “up”? And if there is, did I reach it? Or is there still a distance to it? How long is it? How long will it take for me to reach it? And what will happen to me when I do? Will I be free again?

I want to escape the bottom but when I look down I see only darkness, is there even a bottom? And if there is, did I reach it? Or is there still a distance to it? How long is it? How long will it take for me to reach it? And what will happen to me when I do? Will I die?

… And how much is freedom different from death?

Questions like these were their own unique and vile form of torture, they didn’t inflict more pain, they took it away, and they’ll continue to do so until the well of emotions run dry, and nothing but hollowness and numbness shall remain… And they hurt more than the Tar itself.

Maybe that’s the tar’s true form? I don’t know.

If I tried to swim it hurts, If I stayed still it hurts, all I could do is flail my hands in pain, and occasionally outstretch one upwards in hope for someone to grab it and pull me up, from what I’m now certain of, the hell of this world, but it’s my world: there is no one here but me.

As time marched without the remotest semblance of care for me, or anything really, I couldn’t distinguish between the pain of burning or the pain of freezing anymore, they merged into one singular pain; the pain of being alive, the pain of breathing in the tar.

I wasn’t dead, and I wasn’t feeling alive; I was somewhere vague in between, and that what hurt the most.

I screamed and screamed, I’m not ashamed of admitting it, but did I make a sound? Because it’s sure as hell it didn’t reach my ears, maybe it was because they were covered in tar, or maybe because my lungs were submerged in it.

I wasn’t good enough to escape that place.

And now you are wondering where am I, well I’m still there eternally drowning in pain, but something is different now, I don’t feel it anymore: the well ran dry, and my body tired of processing the pain.

But me being lost on what to do is still true, I just stopped caring.