The Pisces

by Melissa Broder

I, myself, had a very complicated relationship with emptiness, blankness, nothingness. Sometimes I wanted only to fill it, frightened that if I didn’t it would eat me alive or kill me. But sometimes I longed for total annihilation in it—a beautiful, silent erasure. A desire to be vanished.

I don’t know that we are ever really okay in life, but there are times when we feel closer to it—when we don’t remember what it feels like to suffer. During these times we are moving forward in the void, forgetting we are going nowhere, so the void feels less daunting. We feel like we are handling shit. We are handling shit and doing work on ourselves. And then another person comes in, and meets us there, and we think we can handle it. We think we can handle it, because in that moment we feel that we can handle anything.

The trick, I now agreed, was you had to remain unattached to any future wishes or vision. You had to never get attached to any other person or expect anything good to come to you, and that was how you fell in love with life and how maybe certain fun and good things could happen to you. They only happened as long as you didn’t need anything from anyone. As long as you didn’t take anything from anyone or give any part of yourself away to another person, but you just sort of met the other person in space, good things could happen. You had to fall in love with quiet first.

The only way to maybe have satisfaction would be to accept the nothingness and not try to put anyone else in it.

How empty was I that I needed a border drawn by someone else to tell me who I was?

How did they simultaneously have each other and still want each other? To want what you had—now, that was an art, a gift maybe.

Was it ever real: the way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?