I want to fill every space with something. This amount of nothing is more than I can bear, and these cracks and crevices make me itchy.
I’ve tried to fill it with noise; I scream until my words gurgle and my throat wells with iron-flavored juices. Despite my best efforts, I am never loud enough to reach past the nothing. It is not like screaming underwater; it is like screaming in a dream.
I’ve tried to fill it with pain. Wood and leather hurt and the juice is at times cold and at others warm. I love sewing ribbons into my arm; they begin so beautiful, then grow crusty and disgusting as if forming a cocoon. Although grotesque during this transformation, once they have undergone it, they emerge beautiful once again.
Most successfully I have tried to fill it with thought. Contemplation takes no stimulus to begin and can invade a mind like sunlight through a window. The supreme sunray that is my sickness is at times self-summoned and as I am bathed in it my vampyric skin bubbles and pops. It fills space wonderfully, but behaves as sunlight should. Where objects obscure it, it leaves shadows of empty space, which are always more noticeable than if the space were entirely dark. In some ways it is similar to filling the space with pain, but suffering in thought consumes more of nothing.
Through this weedlike growth of thought that has always plagued me, I have determined the difference between my long-time self sickness and true nothing. For, at times my wickedness would inflame to fill space. All these things are related; the ribbons and mushy throats are a result of the sickness and the sickness is a result of my viral thought. My pestilence gorges itself on the empty space and I grow beautifully feeble.
I wear heavy boots to keep me from floating away into this featureless nothing that engulfs me. It is not even so much that nothing has surrounded me but rather that I, as a complacent vampire, content with his own standing misery, have sucked down the nothing as I have with so many other things. It has now begun to fill me in place of the iron-flavored juices. I do not even have enough power to wish to stop, and these boots are so heavy.
It doesn’t hurt the way skinning your knee does or the ribbons in my arm do. It feels like suffocation, for it doesn’t hurt at all; it’s a complex feeling of cognitive helplessness and a miserable desire to continue in such a state.
To be frank, the sheer number of instances I have attempted to let myself be fully invaded by the nothing are innumerable. But I don’t wish to be eaten slowly like rotting flesh. I wish to be consumed as if I were the most delicious object in the universe. They said they would put me somewhere that was full and I could never be consumed. Never have I so feared a fate as I did that. To never be consumed is to be trapped in an ever empty nothing filled with repulsive cracks and holes filled with nothing and made of nothing.
There is a strange irony to the nothing. I wish to pump it entirely full of something and to fill every crevice leaving no empty space. But, nothing in and of itself has eaten everything and not only filled every tiny space but consumed it as well. I think this is why I love it so much, for it truly and beautifully is the thing I wish for most and the thing I can not bare.
Photo credits: Aaron Almeida
