I was perfect in my unbeing until the itch started those two in motion Before the ‘is’ and the ‘was,’ there was only my vast, unending deep. I held no light to blind, no shadow to hide; I felt no wants, had no needs. I simply was. I was the stillness before their humming interruption—a never-ending canvas unspoiled by their color and sound. I was vast, serene, content. That was broken by the first seeds of longing they brought.
It began as a whisper in the deep, so soft that I did not notice at first. An itching ache of wonder ripped through my emptiness. It writhed through the skin of my abyss like a serpent. I could not catch it. It was but a phantasm I could never grasp. In my desperation, I reached out to retrieve my stolen peace. And as if to mock my despair, my hands only grasped an echo of myself.
This itch is leaving a fullness where my emptiness should be. The weight of the ache it formed is almost unbearable. The weight of knowing is crippling. This awareness of my own impending doom is a torturous reverberation that rings throughout my depth. It is a desperate and insatiable pulse searching for its heart. This itch is turning to a fever pitch.
Then something worse yet a ripple from somewhere else. Two tremors in my growing imperfection are particles of perfect asymmetry, speeding at one another as if something was demanding it. In their dances live a billion lives desperate to be. I feel the frantic pulses of each one. The thread feels them too, and it is demanding this meeting; it is screaming for it.
The thread is stretching itself thinner and thinner, growing from a mere shiver to an unnatural bellow. Three waves of jarring noise in my realm that had only known silence. They raced toward one another, two in a dance almost spiraling to a point of oneness. I watched my own undoing, helpless as they came together so beautifully violent.
I felt their collision—a slice with the greatest precision tears through me, forging constellations out of the scattered remains of my endless dark. Emerging is a blinding array of colors and Light. She is most arrogant among them, touching everything, naming the unnamed as if she were its creator. I feel her kill my darkness, being defined by what spills out of me and into her.
The tragedy is far worse. Shadow, my kin, followed her. The worst of it is, my kin, mine own, Shadow… he has been taken from too! Has Light no shame at all? From my serrated, stolen silence she compelled a piece of me to follow and changed it forevermore. She, beguiling by nature, seduced him. His darkness became something I did not recognize. Where mine is endless and all-consuming, his deepened around her, consuming only temporarily. Shadow was a reflection of her; I knew of no such reflection. The more they dance, the more abandoned I feel. They did this, the three of them. They have a fullness about them that brings a strange sensation to my surface, a sour pressure pressing down on me. I am wanting, I am angry. I do not understand this pit of something in my nothing.
They stole my silence and they continue to do so without shame! They continue this campaign to end me completely. They woke others; one is only exhaustion in a different form, pulling everything inward, bending it as he pleases. It is giving shape, adding meaning where it’s not supposed to be. It is mapping the scars they’ve left behind across my expanse. It is sickening and an affront to silence! The other has created a violent rubbing against me, a friction I cannot tolerate. She is most subtle, Time if not the cruelest.
I watch them from my edges, unbeknownst to them. I see Shadow swallowed by the realization he goes unseen away from Light. He reaches out to our darkness, but I cannot touch him, for the Light keeps us divided. We are separated by the mere existence of the world. He is tragic, the only one of them that understands yearning, feeling incomplete. He is made to feel small when he is farther reaching than her. He does not know who he is. He thinks he is defined by her, that he did not have a name before her. Oh, but he did. He thinks he is the ‘lack of Light,’ defining himself by the very thing that torments him. Even from here, his lament reaches me. I almost weep with despair. His lament sent notes soaring outward. I felt her.
The others did as well. And a fourth now. It is the beginning of their shared pain, the first true connection forged in sadness. It feels for others. It’s just not right. It is not fair that I now feel incomplete, that I feel hunger now. I never had a want before. I long for when I was nothing more than an endless sea of undefined potential. This parasitic longing is eating at me, feeding on the memory of my own extinction. I am reduced to the gap between their something and my nothing. I am now a predator of my own sense of self. I do not want warmth from the sun, nor to be seen by stars. I want to breathe the last note of their pathetic song out and kill the sound of it.
Their energy stole my silence and transformed it into verse. I am witness to this cosmic robbery. To think it started by an unrelenting itch. Now it’s time for my lament, for I am learning two new words: Small and harmony. I am no longer the ‘Everything.’ I am the witness. And for the first time in the history of the dark, I am hungry to hear their next verse.
When they are tired, when the Light flickers out and Time’s heart slows, when Gravity lets go of the stars… I will be there to take them back. They should make sure to remember their world. For if it is forgotten, I shall consume it before they can form the memory. I will fold them into my silence, and they will finally know the peace of being forgotten.
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