After a lifetime of wandering, and wondering, and waiting, and never knowing, after all that space and time and confusion and expectation, at last I've found it.
Yes.
And here.
Here!
Can you believe it?
Can you believe what I'm telling you?
I've found it here.
Yes.
Right in front of my eyes—all the time it was in full sight, and yet all the time it was there I was blind to it.
It?
You're wondering what it is?
Let me see.
How can I describe it?
Well, I could call it ‘strangely unknown and obvious’, maybe?
But straightaway that sounds pretentious.
That is pretentious.
And it’s not that complex anyway.
I could say it was surprising, and that would be true, but only in a way.
In the back of my mind I always knew it would happen—something would happen.
But that's not it, that's how it affected me.
But how I came upon it seems more to describe it than anything.
Yes, that seems as much like it as I can get to start with.
It was simply always there.
Just always there.
There.
Yes, it was always there.
But I know it's not that simple either.
Certainly it was there, and that was surprising but there was more, in that moment of coming to know it, there was more..
I’d always been looking, yes, but now it's found I realise it’s not something I wanted.
How could I want something like that?
This thing, that I've missed but always should have seen, is not a sweet gift—not as I had expected a searched-for thing would be, should be.
It’s not a joyful discovery, not like something wished for and then received, not like something lost and then found.
No, not like that most wonderful thing—something lost then found.
How I wish it were.
No, this longed for discovery has a strange oddness to it.
For with it comes dissonance and separateness.
It brings a sense of foreboding, a sense of something malevolent, or dark, or sinister.
I shiver at the thought of it.
This is a black knowing.
This thing has nothing of the joy of novelty, or newness.
With this finding—this found thing—there’s no exhilaration of the moment, no excitement of the novel experience.
No, this found thing brings none of those, none of the delectability that make our life seem fresh and delightfully on the edge.
No, not those things—it has none of them.
Instead, it brings the abyss, a massive nothingness filled only with a dreadful silence.
A silence.
Yes.
But of what?
I'm not sure what?
The silence of dismay maybe.
Or emptiness, if that can be silent?
Or isolation?
No, it's more profound.
It's something fixed, something permanent.
Yes, that's it. It's still and it lasts—maybe it lasts forever.
That's the horror of it.
With it comes a dreadful, unavoidable lasting, impenetrable, eternal stillness—the stillness of a world stopped.
Can you imagine that? A world stopped?
Is that like death? The death of everything?
Is that what it means to not exist?
Is this what I'd wanted?
Is it possible that I'd wanted something so black, no, so nothing for nothing cannot be black nor anything that we know.
But I know it.
It has found me and I know it.
I'd been seeking it so keenly, and then without regard for my efforts, ignoring my pitiful hopes it found me—this dreadful, dreaded stillness has found me.
And I am swept up into the arms of its nothingness.
Yes, it found me, and I did nothing.
Well, that's not true, I did something, I wanted it—I didn’t know what it was I wanted but I wanted it.
And I had no means of finding it—pitiful seeker I am.
I was never going to be the finder—I was always the sought.
As if it would have mattered anyway.
Our union, if I could call it that, was unavoidable.
Union—is it a union if you're swamped by another?
A combining maybe, but then in unequal shares.
It knew me, you see.
It had been observing me—stalking me, hanging around in its dark places, noting my movements, waiting to pounce, waiting for that moment when I thought I had discovered it, that moment when my guard was down, to pounce.
Yes, it had seen me many times before—everything is in its view.
It had been watching me but I'd ignored it, refused its shadowy attention, turned my face away from it without even knowing it was there.
What a fool I've been.
I'm exposed now in my idiocy.
But there’s no gain in regret, no advance in knowing I’ve been bettered by it.
It has happened this way.
And here it is now, this newness, this black newness of the nothing world binding me to itself.
And it does not care for me, it's garish and cruel, winding me up in its coloured ribbons like a May-girl, tying me up in its glittering streamers until I cannot move, then making more certain of its power over me, holding me in bondage, preventing my movement, first with its silken ropes fine bound by those enslaved in its dungeons, and finally, as if that was not enough, weighing me down with heavy, golden chains, wrought in its furnaces deep in the labyrinth of un-knowing and poured into the moulds formed from the ashes of those like me who have gone before.
And in this black nothingness there's bleakness and noise—the noise of killing. Destruction. Injury. The organs of others. The limbs of others. The blood of others. I'm soaked by the sloppy mess of it all as it claims my suddenly lost hopes for a future, as it swallows my expectation, my dreams, my glimpse of light and calm in greedily taken, gluttonous, spit-dribbling bites. And I see the end of it all, wrapped up in the swaddling of injury and pain, of loss and fear. And it ends in the same instant that it began—life and death as one.
And so at last we are as if one—a form of some sort, a unification, an imbalanced one of course, me in submission, and it, whatever it is at the centre of its dark malevolent heart, with complete unyielding control over me.
A form?
A union?
How can I answer that now that I am held to the floor in its bindings—bound tightly into the filthy mud of it all, injured, bleeding with my clothing pulled into the gaping, fleshy wounds.
There is oneness and there is combination, but this is a coming together of hopelessness and control.
Strangers entwined in a passionate embrace.
I can hardly bear it, but I cannot deny it—it has happened, is happening, will forever happen.
This is my destiny—the unbearable and eternal knowledge of it, the dreadful certainty of it, the permanent unchangingness of it.
Yes, it is my awful, suffering destiny.
