have you ever drowned in a pool of your own blood and been resuscitated by yourself after entering the 9 circles of hell? you enter one hell for each month, and at the end you are reborn again.

the first month, you are forced to watch a movie of your former lover's future love life, the day their sky wasn't your favorite shade of gray anymore, their wedding day, their children growing up in the arms of another, the ending of all endings. you cannot leave the theater, you cannot cry, you cannot scream, only apologize on a cycle like the mixtape you played on repeat that they gave you the day they first told you they loved you.

the second month, your demons circle you for 31 days straight. they tell you the stories of your past you swore you forgot, the knives you though you pulled out, put back in the drawer, and locked away are in their hands. they sing songs of everything that has gone wrong. they wrap their festering arms around your shoulders, they leave oil stained kisses on your neck on the same places all of your previous lovers did. they hold your hand like your mother did, they take you in their arms like your father did. they tell you they love you, you begin to believe them, and on the 31st day they leave, abandon you, the bitter iron taste that is all too familiar enters your mouth.

the third month, you are on the fourteenth floor of an abandoned mansion. salvador dali has painted a mural of what could have been before you drowned in that ****** sticky murky mess of red upon a wall, and you are forced to stare at this for two weeks. on the 15th day of this month van gogh appears in the corner with a box. you open the box and it is of course, his ear. he can see the monstrosity of fear upon your face, you see him open his mouth, you can see the pain escape his lips, but you cannot hear a thing, you look to the wall next to you and a the glow of the burning mural of what your life could have been lights up a wall of ears. you see yours in the center. you cannot hear the fear, you cannot hear the birds, you cannot hear the songs. your past and future are both now long gone.

the fourth month, you enter a white room. a projector projects every memory of your mother from the time you were in the womb to the time she saw your blood surface and your name headline the obituary. every projection of the memories of your father have a slit through the middle, and you swear to god for a split second you see yourself flash across the screen trapped in the barrel of a syringe with each of these memories. you are held captive in this room, this jail cell, with every broken memory that has led you to drown. you cannot cry. you cannot scream. you cannot even hear your own happiness, you cannot hear your mother's voice or the last time your father said i love you. the words goodbye pour as ***** out of your mouth.

the fifth month, you awaken confused as to when you left consciousness. you are in a wooded area, there is a phone stuck to the tree, and you can see the phone vibrating. you answer, though you cannot hear, the leaves on the trees begin to fall off and make out the words of those on the other end. it is the last words of all your friends, the words they screamed after they realized they would never see you again. you try to expel the words that you wished to tell from your chest, from your lungs, but the blood is still oozing within your throat. you are hopeless. you drop the phone and climb the tree hoping to see some type of sea that could help you be free.

the sixth month, you are drug out of the tree by the demons that you began to believe loved you. they drag you out to a sea, they throw you in it, the salt burns the holes where your ears once were. while under water, you see every fetus you will never have, every broken bottle that touched the lips of those you love, every bit of ash from the cigarettes that killed the good cover the sea floor. you have forgotten how to swim and the light is beginning to fade, someone, something, pulls you out. deja vu of exiting your mothers womb washes over you.

the seventh month, a book of every word you ever spoke is placed upon the dirt of the sea bank. you sit in silence and reminisce with your own history book. you can hear the waves, you realize the salty sea fertilized your eardrums, your ears are back in tact. you find some unsettling peace in this place. this month seems so short. so distant. so incessant.

the eighth month, you are drug into a room by those ******* demons again. in the room is every god you've ever known of. they convince you that you were never evil, that your omens were not the demons you have met, they tell you that there is future, there is light. they tell you that you can return. they spend the first three weeks dwelling on the positive things you placed into the world. during the last week, they explain their personalities, each of them, their multiple personalities. they expound on their traits, and god do these traits sound so **** familiar. jesus hangs from the ceiling, and jesus tells you that there was no light, no truth, only the trees. the ******* trees. jesus tells you that he died for himself, not for you, not for them, not for his father. he died for himself, to remove his own weight of pain. god sheds a tear, buddha holds his hand, mother nature hands you a bouquet of wildflowers. they vanish shortly thereafter.

the ninth month, you are still locked in the same room. you realize the room is actually just one solid mirror, the floor, the ceiling, the walls. you realize you were seeing reflections of yourself the entire time, you realize you were speaking to yourself. you realize you actually could speak, that you weren't choking on your own blood. you stare into your own eyes, you ask god for forgiveness. the room goes black.

you awaken in a hospital bed with a bouquet of wildflowers in your hand and a notebook the size of a bible on your chest. you open the notebook and page after page is every ending note you had ever wrote.

you flip to the back cover of the notebook.
it reads: you are forgiven.