Here's the Hell Paper I wrote for Parsont, if anyone cares
Sarah Fitzpatrick
2/27/06
Honors English 9, Period 9
Journey through Hell, Draft 2
I took a quiz once. One of those dumb online quizzes that are supposed to tell you what level of hell you’re going to go to, what your sin is. I don’t even remember what my results were. It doesn’t matter; they’re not important. Writing this paper is supposed to be about my fictional journey through hell. I know kids are going to write about fires and darkness and spiders or thousands of paper cuts- whatever they imagine would just be awful so that they can thank God or fate or whoever that they don’t have to really experience it. My hell is different. I am not dead; I live in this hell. It’s a real place, in a sense. It’s a place in my head that I come in and out of; a separate world that is vaguely related to but completely detached from the real one my physical self lives in.
To explain my hell, I guess I have to explain why I’m here. Or there, depending on how you look at it. It could be all kinds of reasons. Maybe it’s that I make decisions too quickly. Maybe it’s that I don’t base my decisions on reality. Maybe it’s just bad luck. That doesn’t matter too much. For whatever reason, I am doomed to never be sure of anything.
Perhaps you can pass judgment on me, why I’m here and what I’ve done, solely by reading this paper; perhaps you’d have to know me better. It’s possible that neither of us will ever really know how I got into my hell or how I get out of it. It’s a story still unfolding. Nothing is certain in it. So I guess now’s the part where I try and make you see what my hell really is. Reality and imagination are interchangeable, and the reality of what you read is both real and not at once. This is the story of my hell- uncertainty.
There’s a little girl sitting on the curb of Main Street, Disneyworld. Behind her is a store filled with souvenirs. She is crying because she cannot decide which key chains she wants her parents to buy for her. Her family is watching a parade of lights proudly marching forth for their entertainment. Golden bulbs and flashy colors and glowing floats contrast with the dark sky and the figures silhouetted against the stores and restaurants of the street. The darkness and the light are bickering, like the thoughts in her head. The little girl will be neither entertained nor consoled. She cannot decide. “Some things never do change…”
I am sitting on a swing set in my backyard. It is the kind of swing that seats two people facing one another. A cage of white metal and green plastic where your knees bump together and no one can stand up until you both do. I do not have this problem; I sit alone, watching the sun sinking lazily behind the trees, going out in a blaze of orange glory. The leaves are just beginning to turn shades of crimson, copper, sienna… the trees are just at that stage where they begin to weep them away reluctantly to create a scene both sad and infinitely beautiful. It is both relieving and agonizing. I swing back and forth as I watch. I am always swinging back and forth on this swing by myself. I can get up, but I don’t know if I want to. I don’t know what my favorite season is. I am in-between, in the middle of the swing’s arc, neither up nor down. I can’t decide. “Oh what marvelous things but, they are, they are, they are giving me the creeps…”
There is a princess in a stone tower. No sunlight filters in through windows; there are none. The floor is cold. The stones are worn smooth from the slap of her bare feet pacing, pacing, pacing. The silence echoes with frustration, the walls whisper and scream, the stones are lonely. Her fists ache from dealing angry blows to her confinement. She’s lost the key. She cannot decide what to do. The princess can’t decide.
“Evil in my head, in my head, inside this private hell. I’m not doing very well.” I’m wandering a long hallway. The dust is thick like powder on the floor. The texture of it is soft and it tickles me, but I know that this is a hard place. Even the spiders have abandoned their silken webs, and the hall is dark. There are doors, everywhere. Doors with brass, round knobs and doors with cheap, fake diamond knobs and doors with rusty iron knockers. I don’t know which are locked and which are unlocked. I don’t know where I’m going or why. The doors breathe quiet words, sighing words of sound advice and hissing words of malicious intent. I am frightened and confused; I choose no door. I can’t decide... “Dreams that make me sad…”
A girl and a boy wade through the chill ocean waves; the freezing cold bites like the wolves she once imagined lived in the woods behind her house. The sun beats down rays of heat that warm everywhere they are not wet. The heat and the cold battle over them; no one can decide who wins. The sharp pebbles on the sandy floor prick their numb, unwary feet. The pain and the numb contend for superiority. No one can decide who wins. She doesn’t know. She can’t decide. “I think I’ll just sit for a while…”
There’s a book on the floor. The pages are yellowed with age and they are torn. Some are strewn about the otherwise empty room, the golden pages offsetting the dark brown wood. They are thrown haphazardly about the space, littered carelessly like a New York street. The ink on the pages is faded, but it’s my life that’s in that book, and I’ve torn all the pages. I wrote it down because I wanted to remember, and then I tore it up because I wanted to forget. I can’t decide if I want to read it. I can’t decide. “I’m running away from myself. There’s too many demons around here now…”
There’s an empty apartment and a ragged dress unworn in a closet. There are photographs with no pictures and scenes that turn gray. “Polaroids of classrooms unattended…” I’m here but I’m not and I can’t make sense. Someone’s alone in the dark and the playground’s in pieces in the parking lot. I’m scarred and I’m hurting but I’ve got to be just fine. There’s a statue of a little girl and someone keeps changing her face so she’s me but she’s not and she’s lost and confused. Mornings used to carry the rich aroma of freshly brewed coffee; now they’re just fighting for the shower. “Are we going up or just going down?” There’s a scary moment where I’m underwater and I can’t find my way to the surface and another where I’m spinning in circles but then the ground is approaching way too fast. “And the climb can kill you long before the fall…”
My world’s in fast forward but I’m moving too slow and I’m crazy but I’m sane all at once. “The agony and the irony, they’re killing me…” There’s a huge storm cloud that never rains and a teddy bear that’s seen too much. I don’t know where I am or where everyone else is supposed to be. There are tears that trace cold, salt trails but I just have to smile. “You don’t make sense…” There’s a boy and a girl and they don’t know who they are and there’s a reading light that won’t turn on. There’s an equation on a chalkboard and the air tastes like eraser dust from the problem I can’t solve. All the possibilities and opportunities and are just about killing me. “Where all the scars from the nevers and maybes die…”
And I’m back at the hall of doors, the center of all this. The hall that ultimately symbolizes everything my hell is. And I know that to leave this hell, I’m going to choose one of these doors. I will not be condemned forever never to be sure, always to be afraid, always to regret. I don’t know what’s on the other side, or what tomorrow’s bringing, or anything else for sure, but I’ve got to make this choice and I’m going to. No matter what lies ahead, I’m going to be free.