It’s so dark that you start to see lights flicker before your eyes. You can see the neurons firing as your brain tries to understand how it could be so dark. You start hallucinating. But what’s different about this Darkness is that these are hallucinations of things we haven’t yet lost - the moments of greatest pain and sorrow in one’s life yet to come. The brain doesn’t understand such total darkness can exist; grasping desperately for photons, it attracts them from across the veil. Nauseous refractions off the line of sorrows one has yet to be afflicted by, called out across time by eyes suffocating for light.
The oldest understand the visions best - they see but the last few cards of a deck which has already been played out anyways. Sometimes they see nothing, for their trials are done and all that awaits them is the quiet whiling-away of days. These, whose lives contain no more great sorrows, take no comfort from this. The end of sorrows is to them itself the last sorrow, the last dark, begotten of darkness, darkness’ end. A life with no more moments of horror itself a horror to them. And they weep.
The younger ones think they are viewing a simple nightmare, that that forevision of horror and pain and loss and loneliness is a fabrication, a superstimulus, a wet dream of suffering. They see things which they think mustn’t exist, just as monsters cannot. And they do not weep. Not yet.
A few more understand what they see - those who have understood enough of pain to believe in it, they are not steeled, they are not strengthened, for if they have known true horrible pain and recognize each of these premonitions, they are all the more shattered to see the length of them - to see that what they had thought singular agonies, moments of unbearable pain so gladly put at last behind, they see stretched out, mile after mile, hour after hour, tear after tear, off to umbral horizon. Having borne sorrow, having thought themselves fortified, they see unwound before them a life filled with suffering a hundred or a thousand times as great as that which they had thought unbearable. Unable but to recognize this train of pale moments for what it is. And they weep.
Images of screaming flailing loneliness, of icy goodbyes later so regretted, of cruelties unintended and unamended, of ways parted with words unsaid, of silences unbearable borne forevermore - and the most terrible painless pain, that of beholding as those we love suffer like we suffer, cry as we have cried, oh would that we could take it from them, but we cannot!
And we weep, for the light is part of the darkness.
But…?