Emptiness

I am my words. I am my actions. My wit, my charm, my unacknowledged intelligence and seeming sense of self-awareness. I am who I am with friends. With family. With lovers amongst soft cotton sheets. The social me, the outer face of youth and vigour, vitality. I am my goals, my dreams and all I will achieve. All this. I am empty.

The hollow men. From thin veneers of paint on an empty canvas to the airbrushed beauties, waving out from glossy magazines and twitter posts. The shallow, skin deep value of emotion. The lost connection, a non-existent telepathy we do not have but need to be alive, to feel, be, real.

I look at you, I know you. I know your jokes. I know your friends, your girlfriend. I know the beer we shared on a cold park bench. The guy you punched for stealing my phone. The years and years of memories that stretch out endless. But then again, I don’t. Your eyes are empty. Your laughter could be genuine and it could be false. Our memories, our lives together and apart, faded times I cannot prove aside from the reels that show in the empty cinemas of my mind. I sit alone and watch them. Look at you laugh and play, your anger, mock humility. I see bitterness, sincerity. You see a blue flower; I see a broken yellow butterfly. Our lives aren’t real, aren’t shared. Two individuals that happen to be in that same moment together, but inhabit entirely different realities within their minds, their memories. I see me, and I do not know me. I see you, and some stranger smiles back.

Inside, the emptiness wells up…then breaks and floods. My eyes, they lose their colour. Before they held the sea, so bright and piercing blue that cute girls would lose themselves within their oceanic depths. They are now grey, cold, and dead.

You shudder as infinity passes through you. All it took was a few little pills.

In the darkness, you’re reborn. Great heaving gasps that hurt your chest. Look up. See your new reality. Take in the future.

Fingers are pointing at me, like deformed stalactites. They stretch out from the vast darkness, accusing the infinity beyond them. Water rolls along their tips, slowly tapping out a soft booming echo that pulses like beating heart. The source, somewhere high above the head, is invisible under the black sky. The statue itself is half darkened, illuminated only through its own sheer magnitude.  What remains of the face is cast and cratered in shadow, more seen through blurry fantasy of nightmare hallucinations in your mind that witnessed by the eyes.

The eyes, they move. Black, ringed in incandescent white. They stare at you.

There is no escape. The infinity traps you. Its timeless expanse puts you everywhere, and nowhere. Those eyes, they find you. Fly a thousand millennia and their gaze remains fixed upon your soul, still follow. White, endless light. Burns your mind. Burning.

Hell is not judgement. There is no one fit to judge. Hell is eternity, a mind trapped within an expanse it is too small to comprehend. God is dead, at least dead to you. His fingers reach out and accuse the infinite. The eyes look out, and burn, but do not see. They burn in cold hatred, burn bright into the chilly expanse that killed it. Infinity meets his gaze and laughs.

You stand, frozen in the midst. Your mind is gone. Freedom here is insanity. No joy, or pain, love or fear, nothing. Emotion is incomprehensible. Time is meaningless. Space. Me. Empty concepts that infinity devours imperceptibly. The infinite is your jealous God. He gives everything of the nothing he has. Shares his lack of love with you. Opens the emptiness of his glory. But yours he is, forever.

The mistake you made is terrible. Yet, one we must all make someday. I await you in eternity. No compassion, or hatred. Just like our God of the infinite jest, ours forever.