Listless in Vacuum
A strange sound emanates through these walls. Dampened beats with a corrosive melody. A mirror juxtaposed in my position shows a reflection you cannot recognise. You see a protruding brow, casting shadows over the reflection’s eyes. A feeling you wish to recognise and name, remains clouded.
You hear everything, claps of thunder, swishes and crinkles of water on glass, hammering of ice, smells of a sugary dish whose components you cannot remember. You remember asking a wrong question to the wrong person. Being shown another path as a result.
The mind is heavy. As it always is. The decision tree has sprouted too many branches. You had your doubts. Always in the back of your mind engulfing every waking thought. You’ve heard many things you should be, many things you should do. Far too much from ones who seem to know less.
There was a time you would have questioned another’s judgment. But now, you do not care. There’s little anyone can proffer that you haven’t told yourself.
There are lines drawn from an imaginary node that hold everything together. A node that is slowly disintegrating from all the weight it is pulling to itself. You are the center of the universe, you think to yourself. If not you, then who? So comes the rhetoric. All of them, mere components in an illusion you’ve told yourself as your story.
There is a space you know. A space you once inhabited. From which germinated the seeds of wisdom that eventually decayed and led you to where you stand. There is a space you once held dear, a space that led you to question, introspect, and build walls around the ones who would threaten your very existence. There is a space you remember. A space that kept you comfortable and going. For stopping meant succumbing to a malice you cannot name.
Thrown into a crucible, you meant to pause. Get to the powered state that you could bounce back from. And instead you stand, weaned off of what you once held dear and precious. The air that was supposed to refresh no longer wafts to you. All you sense is a vacuum. The space you held dear is here. Only it’s filled with remnants of what could have been. Half-formed structures and thoughts, their nodes undone and faded.
The power you meant to acquire stares at you, and you realise that it is not what you wanted at all. And there you stand, without reason, without hope, without purpose, an entity suspended in time, listless in vacuum.
