The Netherworld
(The thoughts and inspiration behind The Theory of Love and Loss)
What if there was a way the story of your life could be re-written?
What if you don’t like the ending, or maybe you don’t like a certain choice you made and how this decision affected the events that occurred as a consequence?
Have you ever experienced unshakeable regret? The kind that pulls you down into the abyss from which there is no escape?
What if there was a way to go back to the start, make a different choice and cast your stone into another part of the lake so that the ripples moved out to tell a different tale?
What if in fact you could pull yourself out of the abyss after all? Start afresh and forget the pain of the past.
If one was to have this power, would their inevitable dissatisfaction at every draft create a continual loop of beginning, and middle, beginning and middle... nothing ever reaching a conclusion? After all, if you've done it once, why not go back and erase those little moments that cause you to wince at their recollection? Create a better memory!
But then you would find yourself caught in a web so intricate that it would be impossible to unpick. You'd realise the little treasured moments you took for granted in your life, were gone.
Is this the definition of Hell? Realising a new choice had affected something so fundamental, and now that it has been erased, how can you go on, knowing you have the means to go back and correct it?
With an infinite number of possible paths and outcomes, you hold onto the belief that there exists a version of reality where the right path was taken by one of your parallel counterparts.
Could this belief in such an existence be a sort of faith?
A vision of Heaven that keeps you bound to this purgatory state whilst you search for it?
So you return to the beginning, once again trying to rectify the errors, but failing. Your life has now become unrecognisable - strayed so far from your original plan.
You’ve tampered with the untamperable!
Your story has now become a mess of scribbles, and crossings out, so you can't even see the text for what is once was.
Perhaps you have forgotten who you are.
Or maybe, like the gambler’s fallacy, risking all you have left, maybe there is one more chance to start again and win it all back?
This of course is just an illusion.
The only direction will be to go deeper into the purlieus of this netherworld.