Musings on the abyss

In this life — or at least in my version of it, through my eyes, heart, and mind — I’ve perceived time and time again: there is no true rock bottom.

To believe in some final stability — even in ruin — to trust the ‘rock’ beneath the ‘bottom’ is one of those comforting platitudes with which we soothe ourselves and others: a spell cast against chaos, always too tenuous to hold.

Oh, Persephone in the underworld, does this resonate with your truth? Is the chasm closer to Dante’s vision: an inferno of circles within circles, spiralling down to a frozen core where Satan lies immured? Or is hell more like cosmic anti-matter: stretching endlessly, devouring galaxy after galaxy?

Has anyone truly glimpsed the end — or the origin — of suffering? Or do false spring awakenings seduce us with fleeting reprieves, drip-feeding hope like poison into our veins?

It’s a cliché, but no metaphor feels truer to me: life has always revealed itself as a ceaseless plunge through the abyss.

Visions of this endless, looping Möbius strip have always burned behind my eyes. Even as a child, I felt its pull — not in catacombs, but under humming school lights, in echoes of my father’s footsteps outside my bedroom, in dreams where portals opened into more portals.

That’s not to say light never broke through. Sometimes a tender glance, a hidden strength, a spark of life clawing through concrete, caught me in its beam.

But sometimes my vestibular sense tilts; my sense of falling rewires itself. Perhaps I’ve been falling upward all along. I used to whisper it like a secret: “The wires have switched!”

Maybe this is just the fate of a Plutonian soul, endlessly devoured by its own ouroboros; death swallowing life, life swallowing death.

Or maybe it’s not that deep. Maybe the universe simply bows to Murphy’s Law: entropy with a punchline, failure inscribed into humanity’s blueprint. 

In truth, all I’ve ever wanted was to anchor myself in a stable, hidden core — to unravel the destiny coiled tight in my DNA.

But isn’t it futile to wrestle nature itself? Do the leaves resist when autumn plucks them from the branches?

After all, what is life but terror and beauty? What is living but to suffer and love — and to glimpse, now and then, a wildflower cracking through concrete, defying the abyss for one ephemeral moment?