The Netherworld

No, that's the wrong word, for that world must be higher than our own.  I have known for a long time that it exists, but except for a single night-time visitation from my late sister, I knew it in only an abstract way.

Now I have experienced it concretely.  My loved ones have not been annihilated in spirit, only in body.  This I know to a near certainty.

Does this new conviction give me comfort?  Yes it does, intellectually.  But it has also thrown me off my feet, made it more difficult, at least for now, to apply myself in this world, to "carry on" in the British sense.

I am still bereft of my loved ones, after all, and the only path to a reuniting is, as it were, through a wall of purifying fire.  I can go there; I will go there.  What choice do I have?  But I fear the fire and the loss of control that will accompany it.  I cling to my body as I once clung to a stuffed rabbit that long since should have been thrown in the trash.

One of my loved ones said that she had to go because she just grew too tired to persist.  I fear as well that I am on a path towards this sense of ultimate exhaustion already.  In a more perfect world, a goddess ex machina would come to me, either as a creature of this world or of the next.  She would offer me nothing to spark prurient interest, only her magically healing hands on neck, shoulders, back and hips, and I would be rejuvenated, on an upward trajectory once again, one that I have all but forgotten.  

There is no stasis in this, only one trajectory or the other.