Negative Space

by B.R. Yeager

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

If I didn’t do those things, it’d feel like all the Earth’s oxygen was tearing apart.

All the world blurred, a vibrating hemorrhage, and it was fine because I could finally feel how little impact I’d ever have on the world. Losing that dread that one day you’ll somehow ruin everything, for yourself and everyone else. The realization that I could simply leave and the world wouldn’t miss me.

As long as I can remember there was that low hum of suicide ringing through my body.

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?

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

Like meeting God finally and learning he hates you.

You’ve been fearing the worst for so long, anything else is just unthinkable.

Someday I’ll wake up and it’ll be like my life’s already over, because it’ll be dozens of years from now already and I’m still the same. Sets of mirrors facing each other, expanding space and me and every moment I’ve been here. Nobody knows me, because I haven’t left anything for them, and I can’t stand to look half of them in the eye.

The most important thing anyone can know is this: just by existing, by inhabiting this planet and space, we are put into communion with entities we cannot begin to understand, in manners we cannot begin to understand. 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.

Importantly, information only enters the physical upon interpretation. A man sees a piece of art. In the process of interpreting that art, information manifests as a thought—not just conceptually, but, as elucidated above, physically. Here, an essential question emerges: Where does this information go once it has been manifested?

Recent findings indicate that a mind might emerge from anywhere, so long as the conditions allow for it.

No matter what happens to you, everyone eventually makes you pretend like everything’s back to normal.

Time compresses the older you get. Days turn to weeks turn to months turn to seasons turn to years, until your life resides in just one moment expanding forever, where each step and breath folds wrinkles into your face, carving minute, irreversible wounds between your joints. Pressing down the notches between your spine, driving your ankles and knees to ruin. I feel it now and it’ll only be worse in the future.

Wings pulled from butterflies, legs from spiders, and all the other shameful cruelty that causes children to first grasp mortality and morals.

“He had part of me and now that’s gone too.”

Maybe it was really me who had died. Maybe the afterlife was just one final trip, seconds stretched out into forever because the mind can’t recognize its own end.