Thursday, November 19, 2009

empty moments

Have you ever experienced those brief moments, or perhaps not so brief, when you are confronted with complete emptiness: a deep dry well with an inaudible, tautologous echo menacing against your ears. Nothing can assuage your anxiety, comfort your obscurity or fill in this unwholesome gap. Indeed, all that you are offered is blank space. A place to write of your new life, your old death; your perpetual death, and unborn life; your sunken chest or your sunken eyes. Then you exhale and exhale, but nothing emerges—the sky suffocates. This feeling, both physical and metaphysical, burns in all directions, which doesn't really matter, because you lack any sense of direction. It's all fallen cities, people without emotion walking against one another.

You’ve developed such a fixation with nothingness that it has painted over everything—one colour, one large brush stroke, one large gap. Memories in a tattered sack splash across the canvas, leaving nothing, not even the dead fly at the bottom of the well.

You yearn for it to end, but yet it continues to spread like dark wine on fine cloth.

2 comments:

  1. Zeinab:

    Yes, lately, I have experienced this: so profoundly deep is this absence, a loss of all reference, a sense of longing, of being too far. A radical solitude, people, places and things.

    josh

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  2. It's the living without that extends and prolongs these empty moments.

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