Negative Space

by B.R. Yeager

“The key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth? In the wake of a human being’s death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of those who were dearest to them. Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain, a collective corona that still glows.”

The truth is stupid. The truth never makes sense unless you force it to, just like anything.

As far as science has determined, our “self” is nothing more than a product of nerves and neurons and hormones and chemicals. From that foundation, the question becomes many: What forces are we unable to sense that nonetheless influence our existence? Is it possible for us to become aware of these forces? And, perhaps most terribly, what do these forces intend for us? Most of us would likely prefer to remain ignorant to the answer. For while the wasp knows not why it slays the caterpillar, it relishes its job just the same, its master too vast for its feeble senses to comprehend.

The worst part about knowing anyone is knowing only that tiny sliver available to you.

I couldn’t imagine another body, another choked heartbeat, or strange, slow smile filling that gap. No other arms could ever fully engulf me and choke out the rest of the Earth’s hurt.

I put my arms around his slender frame and pulled him close, as though I could fill the vacant spaces inside him, as though he could fix the wrecked components inside me, as though this was what we’d always expected our lives to be like.

We float on the surface of an unfathomable ocean, and though we may stick our hands, our feet, our faces beneath, we can never go much farther without drowning. Once made aware of this, a man can no longer see the Earth as a sphere. It is a serpent. It is a length of rope, forever curling around our persons.

Using the neuron model for consciousness, physicists have determined that a thought (defined as a piece of information), when converted from neuro electricity to mass, possesses weight roughly equal to that of a water molecule.

AW SHIT YEAH I’M BACK FROM THE DEAD.

“I don’t mind real fucked up.” I nearly fell apart. “Okay.”

All the world is water. It’s always been. It took me eighteen years to drown. My body bloats and inflates, pushing in a direction I only know as up. My skin breaks a surface I never knew was there, the water slipping off my knees, chest and face. I breathe. Dying becoming who I need to be. The world is bright light, and it’s inside me, too.

And that’s when I’m certain. The part of me that loved him no longer exists. Not even in memories, when he was someone else entirely, if only in my eyes.

I see her. Decades from now, in a familiar white room, where I had lain and she had waited beside me. The machines breathe for her. I see myself in her body. She is the me that was allowed to age, the me that wasn’t already trapped out here. But I’ve given up on there being a story other than what they say about me now. I will lie down beside her, watching her dreams, looking for my own, until her body falls away. She can’t see me as her body peels away, leaving only a sheet of curling strings. I’ll never see her again but I’ll always remember what she meant to me. I’m here now. People whisper my name in their stories. They carry candles to where I buried a woman I may have loved, where they buried a boy I may have loved. They plant the candles in the dirt and hum and whisper my name. I lay my strings over the flames, watching the light flicker to nothing, and sometimes I whisper back.