The Memory of Water

by J.T. Lawrence

Only people who have been broken will know this feeling: that nothing matters anymore. It’s when things get so bad that you resign yourself to never being happy again, to living a sham of a life. It’s like having a permanent subtitle stamped on your vision: Nothing Matters. It’s there when you close your eyes to go to sleep at night and it’s there the next morning when you wake up, before you have time to think that this day will be better. It’s especially apparent when you are brushing your teeth or trying to summon the energy to lift your arms to wash your hair in the shower. Apart from the subtitle there is also a kind of blurriness to the picture. Whatever the opposite is of rose-tinted glasses – maybe they are indigo shades – too dark to see through properly, making flowers and reflections look fuzzy and black. Meaning is hidden. You would think that Nothing Matters makes the pain less, because whatever is causing you the pain doesn’t matter, but unfortunately it escapes this neat logic, and instead, the more life hurts, the more it doesn’t matter, so the more it hurts.