The Netherworld

What if there was a way the story of your life could be re-written?

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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?

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Have you ever experienced unshakeable regret? The kind that pulls you down into the abyss from which there is no escape?

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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?

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What if in fact you could pull yourself out of the abyss after all? Start afresh and forget the pain of the past.

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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!

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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You’ve tampered with the untamperable!

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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.

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Perhaps you have forgotten who you are.

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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?

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This of course is just an illusion.

The only direction will be to go deeper into the purlieus of this netherworld.