Spaceless Oddity

content:

Sometimes I wonder how I continue to exist in this Void. I am a shell of cold flesh that carries a frayed string of consciousness in a sea of vaporised ink. Funny how I can remember all this flowery language and yet not even my own name. I’ve been here so long that I often cannot tell if my eyes are open. It makes no difference. I need not blink nor sleep. I need not eat nor drink. I need not even breathe. Still I persist while the dark, hollow river pulls me down through the layers and layers of abyss. Perhaps down to a final lacuna at the bottom of all existence, where I shall finally rot away and be gone forevermore.

Sometimes I stretch my limbs, and watch them flail around me in the zero-gravity. It keeps me preoccupied when the disembodied noises around me grow mute. Other times I try to pretend I’m elsewhere, try to imagine myself in a world where things exist and I can do more than listen to meaningless jitter. But every time, I draw up a blank.

Sometimes I try once more to remember where or who I was before waking up in the Void, if ever I woke up here in the first place. If I am lucky, I recollect a scattered mosaic of scraps and fragments. Not enough. Each shard looks and feels so, so important - but to a person who is no longer me. I would regret failing to remember it all, but I cannot regret what I forget.

Sometimes the echoed voices speak in a tongue I can understand. At times they speak of the utter mundane and the day-to-day: looking outside on a warm morning; shared love among family; baking a fresh loaf of bread. And I yearn for them so badly. I can almost smell the scent of its crust wafting around the corner from the kitchen that does not exist. I yearn, but my stomach does not even rumble. My body is being silenced and my mind can only watch.

Sometimes they talk of things to come: a harsh winter; a perilous voyage; a formidable enemy. Mountains of burden, monstrous and terrifying - but to me they are nothing. And still other times they whisper their inner thoughts: their fears; their weaknesses; their secrets; their anxieties. Things I should never be listening to. Alas, what else can I do but eavesdrop? I fill my head with dreams and nightmares, until I can bear them no longer and spew them out of my head in delirious tirades, back into the Void from whence they came.

Sometimes I ponder how I could ever get out of here. It has been days (weeks?) since I made that promise to myself: “I will get out of here”. But how, if I am all there is in the Void? I want to be something. Go somewhere. Do something. I want things to change. But how? A puzzle with no solution, a book with no conclusion.

Sometimes…

A foreign feeling envelopes me. All at once, I can see and smell and taste and touch. The darkened abyss brightens like a flame. The phantom smell of bread becomes real. My lips gasp at the taste of fresh air. My feet touches soil and grass. My hands grasp a laden bucket of water. It’s fresh water from the river, to take back to the cottage. My family’s cottage. I’m going home.

And in a blinding flash it all disappears. I am back again in the torpor of the Void, dark as ever.

“No,” I rasp. “No, I was there! I was there! I was home!”

I spin around, hoping it is all just behind me and I can run right back to it. I raise a clenched fist, hold my breath and give myself a punch in the face. The pain is dull and mute. I open my eyes…

And I still float in the Void. The only river here is the dark, hollowed one dragging me to ruin.

It is gone. My home is gone.

But I know now. I remember something. I had a home once.

What was my home? Where is my home?

Why can’t I remember?

Musical inspiration (not really): :Space Oddity
A revised version of a story from 16 April 2021. I remember being proud of this when I wrote it, but now I’m not sure if it really holds up. Even after the revisions I’ve made I’m not sure if it makes the cut, but it’s certainly an improvement to the original prose.