Mafia: general discussions.

Perhaps this isn't so bad. What's truly bad is when illusions cease to work altogether. And you are confronted with reality. As if with a snap of your fingers, you find yourself face to face with what you once successfully shielded yourself from. A tragic accident, a single wrong step, and you stumble, finding yourself here, below, in reality. Looking back, you realize that all this time, you were building castles in the clouds. While angels and demons helped you erect tall towers and walls, there was no one to rule the land. Once fertile lands have become a swamp, trees have rotted, rivers have dried up, and lakes have turned into stinking puddles. You look at the sky, hoping to see your creations and perhaps return. But no. The once mighty towers and walls are fading, the angels are leaving you, and even the demons no longer want anything to do with you. You are left alone. Here. Below. In reality. Over time, after making several hopeless attempts to escape, you realize that it is practically impossible. It seems that with every step, you sink deeper and deeper. There is no hope of reviving these lands, let alone reaching the heavens. You yourself begin to decay, feeling your muscles weaken, your insides slow down, and your mind cloud over. In the end, only a ghost remains of your former self, aimlessly wandering through the swamp or standing in the middle of it in despair. Sometimes, you hear the voices of other people. Quiet, loud, joyful, angry, sad, cheerful. Sometimes, you see other people. Clearly and distinctly, vaguely and indistinctly. They are happy and unhappy, they feel pain and pleasure, they are doing well and badly. In the end, they are all alive. Unlike you, a ghost, dead among the living, doomed to wander the world in gloom. And the only thing that consoles you is that eternal wandering is not part of this curse. Now that you are dead and your hands pass through everything you touch, you cease to be the architect of your own destiny. All that remains is to think, to remember. About how you were alive, how you did something, what you wanted, what you hoped for, what you believed in. And now you feel only sadness, regret, and the horror of irreversibility. And pain... But that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is doubt. Doubt that even if you manage to escape, to be resurrected, to return to life, to start building real castles, almost nothing will change. Because the swamp will forever remain in your soul. And who said that real castles are stronger than cloud castles?