"The past is a foreign country..." (ficlet for spn_30snapshots)
What You Don't Know About Me Could Fill a Book. Theme 15; Prompt 18.
I wasn't lying to Dean when I told him that I remembered being human.
I remember believing in Hell as an abstract concept, instead of as the place my soul would call home for hundreds of years multiplied by hundreds more. I remember loving and being loved. I remember thinking that my life was important and unique. I even remember what I used to look like, a little.
I remember. I think most demons do, if they haven't been in the Pit too long. The thing is, we don't care.
It's like how a human can remember her childhood. She remembers thinking that a year is so unbearably long. Of course she did; she hadn't lived through very many of them yet. One year was a significant proportion of her life back then. But as she grows, the years get shorter. In the context of her life, as it gets longer and longer, each year means less and less.
So it's not that I don't remember my sixty-odd years of life on Earth. It's just that they don't mean much beside the eighty thousand that I spent in Hell.
Humans can't comprehend a span of time that long. They can get a grasp on a hundred years; they tell themselves that that's about a human lifespan, if they're pathetically optimistic. But five hundred years? A thousand? Their brains shut off and just replace the numbers with, "a long-ass time." Demons aren't evil. This is just what you become when you get really old.
I remember being human, and the time between then and now might as well be an ocean. My past is not a foreign country; it is a different planet.
I wasn't lying to Dean when I told him that I remembered being human.
I remember believing in Hell as an abstract concept, instead of as the place my soul would call home for hundreds of years multiplied by hundreds more. I remember loving and being loved. I remember thinking that my life was important and unique. I even remember what I used to look like, a little.
I remember. I think most demons do, if they haven't been in the Pit too long. The thing is, we don't care.
It's like how a human can remember her childhood. She remembers thinking that a year is so unbearably long. Of course she did; she hadn't lived through very many of them yet. One year was a significant proportion of her life back then. But as she grows, the years get shorter. In the context of her life, as it gets longer and longer, each year means less and less.
So it's not that I don't remember my sixty-odd years of life on Earth. It's just that they don't mean much beside the eighty thousand that I spent in Hell.
Humans can't comprehend a span of time that long. They can get a grasp on a hundred years; they tell themselves that that's about a human lifespan, if they're pathetically optimistic. But five hundred years? A thousand? Their brains shut off and just replace the numbers with, "a long-ass time." Demons aren't evil. This is just what you become when you get really old.
I remember being human, and the time between then and now might as well be an ocean. My past is not a foreign country; it is a different planet.