Echoes

There is only emptiness today. I am not angry or sad, happy or even bored. At 2:17p.m. I realized I had been staring out the window for almost 4 hours. Where had the time gone? I couldn’t even tell you what I had been watching for so long. Were there people walking by? Was it raining out? My mind felt like it had been excavated. Everything of value, even the darkness I clung to – gone, all gone. Was this what death was? Only relics remain, echoes of a person that is trapped deep within me. There are hints all around me. My hands, they are stained with blue ink. And there are books – books lining the walls, the closet, the nightstand. Had I been a writer once? I am nothingness. I am a living artefact of a person that used to care, that used to matter to someone. There is only breath inside my body. A lonely heartbeat in a vast and barren wasteland. I feel a gnawing sense of nostalgia prick at my consciousness. Suddenly, I miss the dread that settled in the pit of my stomach, I miss the panic that rouged my cheeks and the worry that so often creased my brow. My oldest friends – had they abandoned me too? I was no longer standing on the edge of a black void, no somehow – I had become it.