Two Overlapping Conversations that Both Mean Nothing (and Together Mean Something)
Article and Art by Rusty Rhea
What is Nothing?
Of course, there’s an easy answer. It’s the absence of a ‘something.’ There was something there, someone maybe, but regardless of what it was, it’s gone now. You turn around, you reach out, and you feel nothing. You feel for something that used to be there. You feel emotions turn to ash in your stomach as the day crawls to a finish, and then there’s
A sound I can never really get used to. The sound of a wasteland of thought, all that I have left. The last of anything I have. There is a world out there, full of somebodies, full of something. I am one of the few who was given nothing. There is only emptiness. I can sit and watch the world as it turns, and I may even turn with it, but I lack the things to feel. I only feel that there can be a constant
‘Nothing.’ It’s a fine explanation, really. One cannot deny the simplicity of nothing. This is the solace we are afforded. There is a room full of everything we know, and we can be sure this is something; this is the only thing we can be sure of. We can put something to fill the empty spots, to clear out the nothing. We can spend our days working, spending every minute eradicating nothing, to know there is something. Don’t we deserve a simple explanation? Of something being able to triumph over nothing?
So, we’re done here, right? Fine, we have nothing. Get a few somethings. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps. Back in my day, I bought a something for just eight dollars, and I dug my nails into my something so hard it bled. I kept the nothings away for the entire winter. That made it worth it, didn’t it? I had to bury it in the coming spring, but flowers bloomed, and that's a something too.
Alright. You don’t like that answer.
Okay, so we scrap the solace part. It’s just fucked up. We’re fucked. We have nothing, and there is no choice in this. Happy now? We can chase a something, but that doesn’t really change the ending. No matter how hard our feet hit the ground, how hard our breath escapes us, the sound of the thumping of pavement — there is no outrunning the darkness of the setting sun. No matter the scramble towards the crumbling edge. At the end of the day, when we shut our eyes tight and truly see nothing, its embrace will be waiting. We can stop trying to find something out there, because there isn’t a point. There is nothingness surrounding us, suffocating us, clouding our vision to everyone but ourselves. We lose everything, and then nothing remains.
Well, we should consider the upsides, too: if all we have is nothing, then nothing is all that matters, right? We have to find a solution, a Band-Aid to slap on, a way to smile at the end of the day. What’s the point if we can’t find a way to make it better? Why do we get up every day and continue on? There must be an upside, there simply must be one, because then all there is
An everyday onslaught of emotions that rush towards me, even as I sit on this crumbling wall, even as I look toward the skies. It is a relief and a tragedy to know that this onslaught is temporary, that I will migrate home as the day starts to cool. That I will open the door to a dark room and know that it is a fate most fitting.
There is a crack in the jar of everything I hold dear, and the trickle is slow but constant. Leaving behind a drip, drip, drip as I shuffle from some dark room to another. It is easy to know I am broken, to feel emotions rush out of me, no matter how hard I staunch the wound and bite my lip. The plumber can see a leaky faucet, but no matter how hard the pipe turns, the leak can never really stop.
There is someone who passes by, someone that I might even recognize. A laugh emanates from a clumsy smile, and a head clutches a phone to their neck. There is no life outside of this moment, shared between the two. The moment, of course, moves on, and life stills for me once again. For a second, there was something melodious about the blend between the bubbling laugh and the losing of something that will always return to
A vile nothing.
If we’re being honest, ‘Nothing really matters!’ doesn’t really help, does it? You can tell yourself it does; we can all pretend. It still leaves a bad taste in our mouths. We can push our boulders up our hills every day and rejoice at how we will always have to find our way to the bottom. We can shake our fist at whatever higher power we want, to the universe itself even. We can cover our nothing with whatever we get our hands on first. We can constantly fill our cups to the point where it runneth over, but
Drip, drip, drip.
It’ll be empty eventually, right? The boulder rolls back down the hill, and we have to follow it. The cup will never stay full. Whatever we hold the tightest onto, it will crack and fade beneath our grip
Slipping like ash between my fingers. I sometimes wish that I had never learned that there were people out there who could feel more than nothing, who did not live on an hourglass that would always return to empty. I spend so many hours sitting and watching lives I can never lead. There were times afterwards where I would spend days with those somebodies, my absence of anything was able to perfectly reflect the image of those emotions I caught scattered among faces. It never worked the way I wanted it to.
So, square one. We’re fucked again. Sorry.
Not sorry, actually. It’s clear this whole “nothing as the absence of something” could never work. So we’re actually a step behind square one. We’re off the plate. Our feet are in the grass, and day approaches. How can we call nothing ‘nothing’? After all,
I spend every day in a room, on a wall, on the edge of something insignificant. I watch something that I thought was mine drip, drip, drip away. I want to be something. I want to choke down everything flowing out, to stop staring into the abyss.
Isn’t that something?
It’s my nothing.
You can think it’s a cop-out all you want, but if we think that
I must have nothing; I must bleed out every emotion that enters to be able to return to the husk that I know best. What else can I do with
This feeling of being suffocated by nothingness, of the darkness that blots out the light... If we think that those are all-powerful, then that has gotta mean that nothing is something. We have nothing, sure, but that doesn’t mean the absence of anything. Nothing remains, so we have something that continues with us. We are suffocated by nothing, so something must be filling our lungs. We can see nothing in the dark but we can still be sure that I'll know what's really there if I just reach out. If there’s truly nothing, as in an absence, then how can we explain
That drip?
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand it. The drip follows me wherever I go, even when I smile. Even when I still laugh, even when I still wake up, even with a world surrounded by darkness, there is
The existence of something that gives us strength once again?
Something that flows out of me. But
Something that flows back into us, allowing us to rise again. It never meant that we were empty to begin with, or that we were destined to stay empty. If there’s something flowing out of us that will one day flow back in, we don’t lose anything. Maybe all that ‘something’ is just hidden away. We just aren’t able to see it. We reach out, and there’s something that reaches back. It may just be air, but just because we don’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there. Just because it isn’t here this second doesn’t mean that there will never be something.
Time always flows, and the chiming of the clock will always pass. I will wake up, and it will be a new day, with the same sun.
What else could there be?
Sitting, watching the lives of others drowning in a sea of nothing, asking myself, “How could I ever be happy?” but
Those fleeting moments of crying at the movies, calling our friends, rambling excitedly about a story that made us laugh are all we have. That is happiness. All we have is a lifetime of these moments sewn together. Everything we feel stays with us. Not gone or drained out of us. Hiding in the fabric of our lives. Somewhere we can’t quite find yet. Reaching out into the dark. Even if
There’s nothing to be done.
We spend every day working towards this unobtainable idea of having ‘something,’ of being ‘something,’ and those joys we find in the process; it means we’re living.
Maybe I am nothing, and I live a life of nothing.
So that makes us something. Well, at least we are definitely not an absence of something.
And that is everything.
What was the question again?