I inhabit the void, the vacuous space between life and death.
I often catch sight of tourists, standing on the rocky cliffs above, staring out over a shoreless sea of nothing,naked and shivering, hoping to find a god.
There is no god here.
But they don’t have to know that.
Not yet.
This space is a black hole.
At least, that’s how the physicists have described it.
Time moves neither forward nor backward.
When I’m feeling particularly naïve, I think, “This would be the perfect place to love someone.”
But then I look past my own misty-eyed pursuit of happiness and my gaze is punctured by the jagged, colorless rocks below, and I laugh at my own immaturity.
I swim in the waters of barren existence, burnt black from unfulfilled dreams, with schizophrenic regularity.
I swim from the base of my lofty perch until I can’t swim any further, then I swim some more.
My muscles seize, and my own body weight begins to drag me down into the lightless depths, slowly losing the energy to fight the universe’s attempts to smother me in a blanket of its own darkest secrets.
Then I drown.
Only to start again the next morning.
My unpolished underworld stands steady, staring up at those above, a gaping mouth that never screams.
I walk between the trees of the ideal on bridges of amputated souls, welded together with loneliness, accented by the scent of the muffled screams of the fallen and forgotten.
I stop in the middle, gazing star struck, lost in the view that stretches itself into the muck; that memorable image that can be described in one word instead of a thousand:
Hopeless.
