From the moment I was born, I was doomed to die. This has always been the deal with life. When I was just a child - no more than two - I did not have such focus and attention on death and dying, but even then there seemed to be a particular doom and gloom to my little life. By the time I was four years old, I had come to understand death in the way mortals do. Jack, our dog, had died. He was run over by a car while I was in the front lawn playing with him. We were playing fetch,and it was I who had thrown the stick out into the street as an approaching car came just as Jack leaped out for it. I watched as the oncoming car hit Jack, and watched as Jack hung on for dear life, and watched as the life in Jack's eyes mysteriously left him, and then Jack was dead.

My parents had tried to explain what had happened to Jack, but how do you explain death to a four year old? In truth, I didn't feel I need any explanation. I somehow seemed to understand what had happened, and that the seeming finality of it all was really just a transitory stage and that somewhere Jack, or his spirit...his soul...was alive and well. Well, not alive in any biological sense (unless he had come back to inhabit some other body) but Jack's soul was still in existence even Jack's body wasn't.

I don't really remember much of Jack today, other than I watched him die and that I feel some sense of guilt for his death. What I do remember is that Jack's death marked the beginning of my dreams.

I began to dream of apocalypses and of Hell. Not the hell brought on by two drunk parents constantly screaming and fighting. I mean Hell with a capital H. Hell proper. My parents, of course, were not any kind of drunks, they were Catholic drunks, so my understanding of Hell...Hell proper...was instilled into me at an early age, so I have - in my adult years - always assumed that my dreams of Hell were simply just my subconscious making sense out of nonsensical legends and strange mythologies.

The thing is...the thing is, after about the age of ten, I stopped going to church, and was never really all that religious. I don't know why I keep dreaming of Hell, only that I do. Not Hell as in some devilishly red demon with a goatee and horns Hell. Not fire and brimstone Hell. This is not the Hell that pops up in my dreams, and to be honest, I am not sure I could describe the Hell in my dreams any more than I could describe what some distant undiscovered planet looks like. I just know that what I am experiencing in my dreams is Hell.

The deep seeded agonizing despair kind of Hell that in someways resembled my own life growing up, but not in any physical sense, only in the emotional sense. Growing up with my drunk parents wasn't always hell. They weren't always drunk...or, at least not always so visibly drunk. They weren't always abusive...or at least not always so abusive as anyone outside of the family would notice, but they were always, in some form or another, unhappy. Not at all shiny happy people, they were gloomy tragic figures, just as I am today. The only difference is I don't drink alcohol, but foregoing booze never did anything to stave off the depression. What Styron called "the velvet pain".

Velvet pain is a good term for depression and in someways might best describe the interiors of the Hell that keeps popping up in my dreams. Not that this Hell is upholstered with velvet walls or anything, only that the despair felt among the souls who inhabit this Hell seem to desperately cling to that despair as if it is some necessary appendage to keep them functioning. Maybe that is it, that the Hell of my dreams is upholstered with the angst and dread of the souls who inhabit it. More than this, those inhabiting this Hell are not residing there because of any tangible guilt or atrocity, but are there out of some morbid choice.

Desperate unhappy people who choose to reside in a place called Hell, built with the bricks and mortar of deviated emotions and general malaise, this is the Hell of my dreams. The walls of my dreamy steamy Hell are painted - or is wall paper? - with the agonized moans of despair. The floors tiled with anger and rage...red rage...blood red rage...much like my own emotional state these days...since I was four. Can you imagine a rage filled angst driven four year old? I can't, and yet, it seems as if this is who I was. Certainly who I have become, but it seems to be who I have been since Jack died. No relation, really, to his death, just that somewhere around this time, life became a daily struggle with doom and gloom.

When I was eleven years old, my father left. Just up and disappeared as if he never really existed at all. No one knew where he was, or if they did, no one would tell me. My mother seemed to want to blame me, or blame whomever was closest to her, which was me, so for all intents and purposes, it was, in my mothers eyes, my fault that he left us. I do not know what I might have done to cause this, but my mother despised me just the same. Drunken hate filled rants about how useless I am...was...am...

When I was old enough to leave, at sixteen, I left, and a few years later I began the search for my father. I never found him. Years spent searching for a father that no longer existed...maybe never did...only to come up fatherless, just as I have been since I was eleven. I stopped searching for him years ago now, but in my heart, I still want to find him and ask him why he left, and how it was that I was to blame. I imagine he smiles softly, when I find him in my imagination, and explains that it had nothing to do with me, and that he loved me very much, but that the relationship between he and my mother was just too toxic for him to stay. I imagine more in my imagination, but even there, in my imagination, the explanations never put an ease to my guilt, to my dread, and to my utter shame.

The shame of being me. This is the shame I struggle to live with, and most days, in this struggle, the shame wins, and I lose. These are my apocalyptic dreams, this is my apocalyptic life. Every day is a new beginning, and each day is the end of the world. A world of hope smashed to smithereens by some oncoming comet, or some unseen dark star, or ended by humanity's own desire for self destruction, no matter how it ends, the world always ends, each and every day. This is why I hate to sleep. I don't want the world to end again.

I keep thinking that maybe tomorrow I will be happy. I keep trying to be happy today, but I don't know how. I would look to others to duplicate their happiness, but I am fairly certain I have never met a happy person. I couldn't even begin to tell you what one looks like. Everyone I meet is filled with rage, despair, and way too much doubt. It is as if that strange and wondrous acronymistic "TPTB" are not only intent on killing our physical bodies, but are hell bent on crushing our spirits so that if and when we return in a new body, we are more broken than the last time we inhabited a body.

Of course, that kind of talk is tin foil hat talk. I do not want to live a life filled with rage and despair, so I have decided that my call to adventure is to be happy! Thus far, I remain a tragic hero in this tale, but I continue to find ways to escape the Hell of my dreams...the Hell of my life, and somehow just find a way to start living life. No apocalypses, just days of happiness.

That was wonderful, but dark. Your story I believ sums up a lot of what is within us all and the battles we fight.

Just to be happy.

I hope that if this how you feel, you find peace.

By the by, I always enjoy reading your posts. Regardless of whether I agree with them or not.

Speed safe through life!

As tough as I like to think I am,
I almost didn't have the stones to read the whole thing.
It just kept getting darker and darker.

I made it to the end and my reaction is this.

But Jean,
the only way for the impending sense of the end of the world to go away is for it to actually end. The world that is. Then there will be no space for the "impending" sense to exist any more. It will just be the end of the world. I find that dreading it is much worse than the event itself. So what do I do when I'm doomwhelmed? I adjust scale. I assume that the world has been ending for 400+ years, and will continue to end for another 400+ years.


David Grouchy

I same from the same kind of family that you did except my parents stayed together and the abusiveness was constant until I joined the Marines at the height of the Vietnam war... My father refused to sign for me to enlist at that age but when the recruiter that had came to our house to have one of them sign the papers mentioned the $10,000 life insurance policy, my mother was happy to sign for me... I had a portion of my pay go toward purchasing savings bonds and sent home, my mother decided that they were hers because I didn't get killed... I'm not a drinker either, but on occasion I'll have a beer or a couple of shots of bourbon if my head is on right and arthritis pain is more than my prescribed medication can dull out to a reasonably comfortable level.....When I was little I always hoped my father would leave my mother and take me with him... I figured since I had to learn to fry eggs and open a can of spaghetti and meat balls or beans and heat them up on the stove while standing on a chair, I'd be a lot better off than having to deal with a mother that was knocked out for days at a time on paregoric and alcohol or throwing dishes and glassware against the wall while screaming and cussing at me about how neglected she was by my father.

if this is not autobiographical, it is a very believable fiction.


happiness is a dangling carrot. of the many lies we are told as children (especially in the us), we have come to expect too much out of life. no. life really doesn't have that much to offer. just its experience.

"appreciate the simple things" is not just a catchy phrase, but the hard earned truth.

happiness is, really and truly, too much to ask for.

Quite good, Jean!

It made me think back to when I read Crime and Punishment and how guilt can torture you and eat you alive.
I'm glad your story has a happier ending.

I really liked the imagery you used and focused the readers' attention on the fact that not all of our guilts and sins are created in adulthood.

Edit to Add: You deciding to be happy is breaking a cycle generations deep. This is a very commendable decision! Most people would run and hide trying to escape their guilt and pain as you mentioned with your father, which only led to more pain for you and possibly others, The dark can only get darker until someone like you breaks the cycle.

Good story. I have a lot to say, but it would depend on how close this story is to home for you. Perhaps I can find out, and perhaps I can return. In the meantime, have a star and a flag for eliciting an emotional response.

Brilliantly written, JPZ!

So, what is "happiness"? Where, or in what, do we begin our search? I'm pretty sure it cannot be found in knowledge, because those I know who are on a constant quest for knowledge, appear outwardly to become less "happy". Yet, I know some people who are intellectually "as dumb as a box of rocks", but always seem to be completely happy.

What about those who are Prozac happy? Does that mean "unhappiness" is really just a chemical reaction in the brain?

My fear is that, like Neo and Adam, I've already swallowed the red pill and eaten the forbidden fruit. Knowledge is a dangerous thing.

That was incredible... S&F my friend.

I would like to thank everybody who stopped by and took the time to read this brief story of doom and gloom. While writers should write about what they know, and I would like to think I do, this was just a piece of fiction. I am a happier man than the one in this story, and I am a happy man to be a member of site that includes so many esteemed members and profoundly great writers.