Forever Here

Hung till death. Buried till resurrected. Alive till redeemed. He didn’t know it then but eternity was just another word for a cycle of sentences that humanity lived under. Never was one sentencing handed out while another one was being served, and with no view of where it would head once this one sentence had run out, each came across as the only and the last. He sat under the sun, alone on an endless desert that he had escaped to, and waited for night. He didn’t mind the sun because the life he had lived so far had scorched him in other ways, and this escape was of his own choice. This point where he sat at this moment was one of his own making. The only reason he waited for the night was because he had followed a star to where he was now and he had to keep following that to drop off the face of the planet that he knew to have an edge that no one yet had discovered, and those who had, had already fallen off just as they had hoped they would. No one had returned to speak about it, or give its coordinates for the world to follow. The world, or most of it, was desperate to stay away from it and stay at the centre where the pull of life and gravity was so strong as to keep them rooted in their own captivity that they thought was freedom because the next sentence had not been handed out as yet and the edge of the world had been written off and its seekers laughed off as mad for letting the pull of the drop tear them away from the bond of humanity that was one in its misery that held it like a glue inside which they all bubbled and only came up for brief moments that they called happiness and loved them more for not having to share it with others like the misery that they all didn’t mind sharing, also because there was so much of it. He had been gone for a long time and he would have to keep going with that star for company and direction and find that edge or he knew that he would find his way back to that crowd and those who had were known to stay back with the pull of humanity and its despair even stronger on them. It was said that humanity discouraged those who sought the edge to give up on that pursuit because those who failed brought back with a feeling of helplessness that the others too would wallow in and the brief moments of resurfacing for that feeling called happiness would be fewer, for lesser duration, before the weight of their own sorrow would drag them down into the same pit that was part of the sentencing but was called life because somehow that made humanity feel superior and in control of their own lives which itself was bound in by a mesh made of time and space. When night would come, he knew he would find that star and follow it to the edge and then he would take a step and fall over and escape eternity and the sentencing. But he didn’t know it then, that for the very few who dared to escape, that was where eternity led, secluded from the cycle of sentencing, to a single one that lasted forever.