An Open Letter to Nothingness

 

To Naught, For Whom Everything Is: 

I think tidying my room and reading beat poetry might arouse something in my head or my heart, but it's for you. I think feeling the passionate, toxic, longing of old lovers' love might reawaken me, but it's for you isn't it?

I've been thinking that now is a time harder than ever before, this year, this month, it's a challenge the likes of which I haven't endured, but I'm reminded of the recurrence of sorrow and the abusive rock of apathy under which my legs have withered and succumbed. The world just feels so newly hostile and cold and isolating. I break my nails under the earth trying to dig myself out, my skin is cracked and bloodied and my body, unmoved.

I've convinced myself that if I create a crisis  . . .  having created it, I may know the cure and I may feel I've conquered something, but I can't even lift my head, and all the crises I've manufactured are lining up around me, and they're holding their hands out, and they're growing impatient.

Everything is in flux at once and my measuring mind is gasping for air:  the collapse of democratic institutions and with them, my faith in the system to which I've devoted my life; the rearing of the ugly head of all the failings of a broken system that privileges the privileged by stealing the products of the not; hundreds of thousands dying alone needlessly, hundreds of thousands more heartbroken. It's disillusioning, I once thought it was repairable but it's for you, I see that now. 

A six-dollar bunch of grocery store sunflowers can't, on its own, do the heavy lifting of righting this ship, but it's something I can do that's for me--not for you. I revel in the small acts I can do that aren't for you. Your gaping maw can't swallow my sunflowers and your cold skeletal fingers can't close around them. 

And just KNOWING that every single solitary thing is not for you is enough petulant rebellion to curl my fingers back into a fist.

Sincerely, 

An Idiot, Full of Sound and Fury, Wielding Six Dollars