My world… was one of liquid fire. That’s all I could feel, all I could see, all I could think about. I was screaming, and yet there was silence. I was thrashing around, and yet my body didn’t move. My world became nothing but pain, only that feeling of pure magma pumping through my veins like a corrosive poison as it consumed me. This was my only reality. This was the single truth I had.

I don’t know how long I was like this. It could’ve been an hour. It could’ve been years. The only constant I had was that pain, and when your entire existence is filled with nothing but pure agony, time loses meaning. There is no passage of seconds or minutes, only periods when you hurt, and periods when you hurt even more. I didn’t know where I was. Was this hell? It sure seemed like it. Had I died? Probably. Through the inferno that blazed within my body, I kept seeing the gun shot. It happens in slow motion. There’s the pissed, yet arrogant expression of my attacker as he sneers down at me. His finger slowly, so achingly slowly, coils around the trigger. I see the shell bounce out of the chamber, the miniature explosion as the gunpowder ignites, and the impact as the bullet meets my body. Everything after that is fuzzy. The only thing I can make out, the only thing I had to keep me sane in this… this hell, were four words. Let’s play a game.

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Somewhere inside of me, I knew I deserved this. I knew I deserved every nanosecond, every decimal of time I spent in here, as the agony ripped me apart. I wasn’t a good person. It wasn’t as though I had been wrongly sent to Hell by God. I wasn’t confused by this outcome. Just by the fact that there was an afterlife after all. But I… I deserved this.