SOPHIA HELEN
I always thought death would lead me towards the sky;
Instead, I began the long walk down.
There are few moments that truly alter the course of a life. Most only feel important because we are standing too close to them: a marriage, a birth, a death. But the afterlife is built upon far less remarkable moments. The pillars of your afterlife, if you must. Three monumental moments upon which your ever after rests.
The first one is easy to pass.
There is an animal on the side of the road—mine was a dog—it looks dead. What do you do? There are several ways to fail: one might keep walking, convince oneself there is nothing to be done, or look at the body, decide that it is only a body and leave it where it lies. But the gist of it is that they stop. They bend down and place their fingers against the animal’s chest, where they find a heartbeat—faint, but there. They do everything in their power to keep it alive: dripping water into its mouth, hand-feeding it slowly, carrying it carefully, taking it to a veterinarian, and pacing the halls waiting for some sort of miracle. All of the above, and still the ending remains the same: the animal dies.
That is the test. Not whether you can prevent the inevitable, but whether knowing how it ends makes the life placed in your path any less worth saving. Whether you are willing to spend your time, effort and hope on the smallest chance of a miracle. Whether a single what if is enough to make a doomed life worth fighting for.
My first pillar came in the shape of a puppy. His name was Benny. I really don’t know why I chose to name him. Perhaps it seemed cruel to let him die without one. It wasn’t as if the first pillar was a secret. I knew what was expected. Most people do. Parents tell their children. Teachers disguise it as a lesson in morality. The gods allow this. After all, how else could they test what we do in the face of the inevitable? Knowing rarely makes a difference.
I knew Benny would die from the moment I saw him. Still, some part of me thought that I might just be the one person who could save him. Maybe the gods would smile down upon me that day and they’d think, she’s different. I had studied. I had even completed placements at a veterinary school. I knew how to check his breathing. I knew how to hold him without causing further injury. I knew what the colour of his gums meant.
I had all the knowledge in the world and all the hope one could ask for. And he still died. There was nothing I could have done. Benny’s death had been written in the stars long before I found him. And so I passed the test and failed to save him. The gods considered these separate things.
The second pillar appears early in life. Not during childhood. Later. When you have accumulated enough to fear losing it.
A friend asks to borrow money—a reasonable sum. Enough to catch you off guard. Enough to matter. The amount differs from person to person, tailored according to some divine arithmetic only the gods understand. What no one realises is that the test has nothing to do with whether you lend them the money; it begins afterwards, when the friend takes what you gave them and disappears.
What do you do when you lose a reasonable portion of your wealth to a con artist? What is the reasonable thing to do? More importantly: Is the reasonable thing the right thing to do? Somewhere between those questions lies the second pillar. Most pass, though few feel as if they have.
Mine took more than money. She took every shared meal, private joke and secret I had trusted her with, then made me question whether any of it had been real. I never pursued her. I told everyone the money did not matter and that perhaps she needed it more than I did. The gods considered this forgiveness. They marked the second pillar as passed.
No one speaks openly about the second pillar. Many become convinced that telling others is part of the test. It is not. The gods do not care whether you tell anyone. Silence is simply what shame does to people.
The animals and friends used in these tests are called fillers. They are not judged. They are destined for neither heaven nor hell. When their part is complete, they are reborn and placed into another life. The dog returns to the roadside. The friend knocks on another door. Again. Again. And again. Their destiny is never-ending life.
The third pillar is different. No one knows what it is. It fits itself into the quietest fractures of a life and settles there.
There are theories. Of course there are. Some believe it involves love. Others say sacrifice. A few insist that the third pillar is not a moment at all, but a pattern repeated across an entire life. There is no evidence.
There is no dying animal. No missing money. No sense that the gods have placed something carefully in your path. Nothing feels arranged. No warning. No trace of divine interference.
You do not know when the third test begins. You do not know when it ends. You do not even feel the weight of the choice as you make it. It all remains unknown until, at the end of a life you can only hope was long, a staircase appears. Its direction is clear. Its destination is not.
The clouds greet me, almost waving with curling fingers. I peer upwards. Nothing. I glance downwards. A staircase twists into the distance. I look upwards again. The clouds have lost their once-hallowed white. Grey has begun to bleed through them, leaving them almost mournful.
The clouds know before I do.
They retreat from the staircase, their pale edges fraying into grey. There is no gate before me. No divine figure consulting a list. No voice announcing where I am to go.
There is only the first step, two words faintly scratched into it.
I’m fine.
The letters on the next step are cut a little deeper.
I don’t mind.
On the third, the words have been gouged into the stone.
They need it more than I do.
I descend.
Each step carries something I once said so often that it eventually stopped sounding like a choice. With every repetition, the words are carved deeper, until the staircase itself appears to have been built from them.
Maybe later.
It’s not worth the trouble.
I can handle it.
Don’t worry about me.
There are thousands of them.
I see every meal I allowed to grow cold while tending to someone else’s grief. Every night I answered the phone despite desperately needing sleep. Every apology I offered to keep the peace when I had done nothing wrong. Every time I swallowed my anger because someone else’s comfort seemed more important than my pain.
I see the birthdays I treated as ordinary days. The illnesses I worked through alone. The dreams I folded smaller and smaller until they fit inside whatever space everyone else had left for me.
I called it kindness. The gods, however, had a different term. They called it evidence.
The third pillar was not love. Not exactly. Nor was it sacrifice, although I had sacrificed more than enough. It was the quiet question hidden beneath every kindness I had ever offered: Why had being worthy always required something from me?
I had been compassionate. Patient. Forgiving. I had found excuses for every cruelty committed against me and mercy for every person who asked for it. I had given pieces of myself away so willingly that no one ever needed to steal them.
Everywhere I was needed, I gave everything. A little time here. A little dignity there. Another boundary. Another dream. By the end, death did not take my life. It merely collected what remained.
The staircase continues downward.
It becomes clear why no one can warn you about the third pillar. It is shaped so perfectly for its recipient because it is made from everything they refused to see. Mine had followed me for my entire life. It had waited in mirrors I avoided, in exhaustion I dismissed, in every trembling no I forced into a yes.
There had been warnings. I had simply mistaken them for selfishness.
The gods did not condemn me for loving others. They condemned me because I had treated myself as though I were one of the fillers. I treated myself as if I had been placed into other people’s lives to serve a purpose, emptied out and then discarded when my part was completed.
But I was not a filler. The life I had treated as borrowed had always belonged to me.
I think of Benny then. Of his shallow breathing beneath my palm. Of the hours I spent fighting for a life I knew I could not keep. I had believed that even a doomed life was worthy of time, effort and hope. I had believed that for him, without hesitation.
The first pillar asked whether I would stop for a dying creature. And I did.
The third asked whether I would do the same for myself. I had passed myself on the side of the road every day of my life. And every day, I kept walking.
Near the bottom of the staircase, I begin to see her.
She sits on the steps at different ages. A child waits beside an untouched birthday cake. A young woman holds an acceptance letter she never answered. An older version curls up against a locked bathroom door, wiping her face before anyone can notice she has been crying.
Each one looks up as I pass. Their eyes follow me down the staircase. They do not ask where I am going. I have abandoned each of them before. They recognise the pattern.
I want to tell them that I am sorry. That I thought we were being good. That every discarded dream had made room for someone else’s, every swallowed hurt had spared somebody pain. I want to explain that we had been useful. Needed. Loved, perhaps, in the way people love a light for continuing to burn.
But apologies are for things that can still be repaired. So I swallow my words. Of course I do. I almost laugh. Heaven forbid I inconvenience myself with the truth. Old habits die harder than people, it seems. Faced with every version of myself I abandoned, I abandon them once more. Perhaps that is the cruellest part: I finally see what I have done to myself, and still I do it again.
At the final step, there is no fire. No gate opening into light. No angels. No horned creature. No pit of screaming souls. There is only a small room filled with everything I had postponed: a warm meal, a made bed, an unopened gift and a chair beside a window where sunlight spills across the floor. The shadows of clouds drift through the light. Heaven is close enough to cast a shadow here.
A life so ordinary it hurts to look at. It had never asked me for greatness. It had only asked to be lived.
Perhaps this is neither punishment nor salvation, but something that exists between the two. A passage one must endure before mercy. Here, the gods return everything you denied yourself and leave you with it until you understand that you were always allowed to want it.
I think of all the things I had called selfish: rest, anger, boundaries, asking for help. I had treated my own needs like sins and my exhaustion like proof of goodness. I had waited for permission to become someone worth caring for.
I think of Benny again. Saving him had required a miracle. Saving myself would have required far less. A warm meal before it went cold. A night of uninterrupted sleep. One honest no. The courage to remain whole even when someone preferred me in pieces.
I had held Benny as though being loved at the end still mattered. I had lived as though being loved along the way did not.
In the centre of the room, one final sentence has been scratched into the stone floor. Its letters are carved deeper than all the others, cut so far into the stone that darkness has settled inside each one.
I thought there would be more time…
With a lifelong love for literature and storytelling, Sophia Helen has been creating stories for as long as she can remember. Drawn to the extraordinary and the deeply human, she enjoys weaving elements of the fantastical into stories grounded in human experience. Her writing reflects a fascination with morality, identity and the quieter contradictions of being human.
