My Dear Nothing, With Love

My Dear Nothing,

Oh, it has been a while since I last invoked you, hasn't it? I apologize for disturbing you, but I seek your presence again. For I have recently discovered a most terrifying and liberating truth.

We have been through quite a lot together, haven't we?

When the world shuddered and looked away from me, you were there to receive my whispers. When all I wanted was to scream into everything, you held steady and received my roars. When I cried, you received my soul.

I suppose I am trying to say that you have witnessed my growth and development. Only you have seen the unfolding of my very being from those dark moments to the current day.

My lovely Nothing, this weekend the greatest miracle of my life was realized: the person I was severed from the person I am now. Something within me died, however painfully, and something new materialized.

Oh, you have seen the trials and tribulations of my past. Without a doubt, you noticed the way they influenced my convictions, my understanding of a good life, my conception of virtue. Everything I write is haunted by those events, aren't they? Like a whispering choir down a long hallway, just barely audible.

Everything had prepared me for this severance, hadn’t it? You of all people would know.

Do you understand, my beautiful Nothing, how incredible it feels to realize that you are free? That who you were is now dead, merely a pile of ash? Here I am, collecting those ashes into a beautiful vase somewhere within my heart, for he paved the way for liberation.

"How overwrought", I imagine you would say to me. But for someone marked by absence, marked by the reduction of man into a thing, do you realize how transcendent this is?

All I wish is for the sun to rise, so I may run onto the grass and peel my flesh apart to show this realm that I am not a thing but a man!

My lovely void, I never realized at the time that my writing and reading were clearing the grounds for my destruction. A homely destruction indeed.

Love.

Is this disturbing to you, my incredible Nothing? If so, I apologize.

But, above all, realize that I will always be thankful for you, my master, pulling the strings of my compulsions.

Without you, I would be nothing.

Horribly, disgustingly, nothing.

M.V