Empty Spaces
Have you ever felt so empty? As if you are an abyss, and nothing this world throws at you, gives you, or offers you can satiate your hunger — your yearning for something. As if the space where you are supposed to be is nothing but empty, a void.
It’s not like you’re invisible, it’s not like no one cares, it’s not like you don’t hangout with your friends often. No. It’s just that despite everything you have, you still want something more. That sound’s incredibly greedy, and maybe that is how you are but you know it’s more than just that. It feels like you’re missing something, almost like you’re an incomplete person.
And you know what the worst part is? You don’t know exactly what you’re looking for. You don’t know why you feel so unsatisfied, and you don’t know how to stop feeling like an empty space. You just don’t know. Maybe if you knew what this glorious completing thing is then you’d work you’re way towards it. You’d break your back day in and day out climbing mountains for it. If only you knew what it was then you’d run to it, faster than your feet has ever let you, faster than what you though was humanly possible.
But you don’t know what it is. You keep looking for it, but you don’t know what it looks like. You wander for hours and hours looking for the missing piece of you. It’s as if someone asks you to find Tarragon, and you don’t know what the fuck that is. You don’t even know it’s a leaf, a spice, for all you know it could be a strange variation of a triangle. It’s like having bad eyesight and being nearsighted at the same time, and then someone asks you to find Virgo and oh you don’t have a clue what Virgo looks like. At least Virgo has a name; at least you know it’s a star. I guess then it’s more like you’re swimming in the middle of the Atlantic ocean (for whatever reason) and then you realize you dropped something in the water, but you’re not sure what, and you swim around trying to find it while also trying to figure out what the hell is at the same time. It’s incredibly frustrating trying to look for something that might be nothing, something that might not even exist.
Get HP Norimatsu’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
But it has to exist…Because the idea of it not being real, of you just being empty and staying that way is terrifying. Maybe, just maybe, you’d rather jump off the top of that shiny new building. You need to believe it exists, that’s what makes this hell bearable. You know it exists, because you’d give up if it were not real. Whether it is truth or lie you don’t care as long as everything you are is validated by the idea of finding, of being, of fulfilling.
Right now you still don’t know what it is. And you hate that everything about empty spaces amplifies the feeling of incompleteness. The silence screams that you’re missing something, maybe it’s telling you what and where to find it but you just can’t hear it. You hate not knowing. But you’re not quite sure that knowing would be kind to you too. What if the truth is that there is nothing, and you are nothing, and everyone else is nothing? What if this world is just full of empty spaces, of voids? Some people run from death because they know it to be true. Would you run away too?
Maybe not knowing offers you comfort after all.
