Apropos of Nothing

For some reason, I have come to ensure that nothing that I have produced will persist beyond what I can control. There can be nothing that will exist that will be under my name. Everything that I have written must be erased. All that I am seeks a type of death that cannot be confirmed, that is beyond disappearance, that is what comes after the state of absence itself — perpetually unverifiable. I am only here to make proof for a claim that I once was — and still, as of this moment — here to state these facts in order to make them true. Despite the fact that in the future, all of these things that I am writing about right now would not matter, I am able to say that I did something — that even such thoughts as this do not remain to be buried inside the hemispheres of my brain.

I bleed consciousness, the remaining disquietude of the remaining faith I have to a universe that answers all the questions with another question. To you dear reader, there is nothing else, nothing more I could say to satisfy your curiosity. No more to satisfy your insatiable yearning for the discovery of the world to represent it through beautiful prose, in poetic verses, or even in silence — no. I am only here to tell you that there is nothing and only death is true. There can never be anything more. There can never be anything more than this. But I am not here to tell you that I have seen it all. And even if I have, I would not be able to describe everything. There can be no words for it — and that is the same reason why I am able to say that there is nothing more to this. To a life that we hold so dear, everything is, and nothing more.

Call this a fin-de-siècle syndrome but no one has told us that there is nothing more because everything is repetition. Everything is a prayer about the things that we would change if given the chance to do it all again. Until those prayers manifest into action because of the fact that prayers are promises to ourselves that only we can fulfill. I have given rest to the idea of gods and goddesses but I have never forgotten to acknowledge everything that is beyond me, beyond what I can do, and beyond the things I cannot. There are regrets and there are secrets but all we can do is attest to the things that keep us awake at night and carefully choose the words we tell ourselves because the world only makes sense when we are drunk.

I might leave all of this behind until I cannot see you at the end of that flat horizon — that line that separates heaven and earth because I need to get lost and you need to leave. I have dedicated an entire year to searching for the exit door from the universe and I have found it under the pillow that I sleep on every night. Since every day is a choice, I never forget to cover it using my dreams before I go to sleep. There are numerous things that I do not understand and it just so happens that there is already an infinite number of things that I do not understand about the things I am not even aware that I do not understand.

I am practically floating above a sea of air and the only thing I can do is look at it. Contemplate its invisibility. Look at it unfold. Look at my body sway due to forces that I am unable to see. I can only believe that it is there. I can only see what it is in my imagination but it takes on several amorphous forms which can only be suppressed by the idea that it cannot be fully comprehended by my own mind. This mathematics confounds me. I am faced with an impossible geometry of thoughts and ideas until I am caught under the weight of its collapse.

There are fewer and fewer vibrations that echo around the walls it has built around me. I have grown accustomed to its texture and taste but still remains to be the very thing that surrounds me yet I cannot describe it. However, this inability is caused by a deliberate decision rather than the inability to act. I cannot describe it because there are no words for it. But being exposed to this enveloping geometry, I began to be familiar with it. I learned how to shape the very thing I cannot disclose. I want it to remain knowable only by me and through me. Sometimes, I wonder if Jesus was caught up in the same experience as this. Sometimes, I wonder if what is enveloping me is a part of a God that we have been trying to unmask. It causes small things to quiver in their quantum state. Sometimes, the molecules become apparent that they will fall apart but it is because most of the time, I forgot that I am inhaling liquid. So I break matter down using my lungs and I drown without being submerged.

It might have been the coffee. Maybe it is the effect of taking two multivitamin supplements in one day. But lately, I feel that if the surface of the ocean is the firmament of the underwater world, my head, it seems like, is in the clouds. Maybe it is me waiting for my body to be washed up to the shore as I bury myself underneath a seafoam. I have grown tired of bubbles but I never seem to grow up. I am mature enough to tell myself that I do not want to be an adult. Perhaps, my body ages as much as I think about the accumulating bills and papers to sign in the near future. Those that I had drowned along with the voices that used to wake me up in the morning before I go to school instead of alarm clocks.

And so, I like the idea of using bubble wrap as a blanket at night to protect myself from any disturbance but I hate how it feels on the soles of my feet. It makes me feel safe from the worlds of other people and every time I think of rolling myself inside bubble wraps, that idea of safety feels more like the truth. It makes me feel like the world pushes back every time I push the world away. That tension — between push and pull is where the concept of life hangs on a balance. That sense of liminal space when consciousness fails to distinguish between living and dying. I become Schopenhauer’s cat. It does not make me feel like a larva during a metamorphosis. It does not make me feel like I am once again, inside my mother’s womb. It feels more than prison despite not having the experience to be convicted. I know that it feels more than prison because I have already known how to love. How the bubble wraps feel on my skin is an embrace that lacks intimacy and my flesh is made of thorns.

But I learned to be human by watching other people. I learned to be human by being other people. I have learned empathy by faking it, which led me to understand why people leave other people — even those whom they deeply love. As a consequence, I encountered love by leaving other people, leaving places I have known for so long, and burying soil I used to play on during my childhood underneath layers of concrete.

I watched my grandmother exhale her last breath on a bed inside our house. By then, I thought everyone’s grandparents were supposed to die when their grandchildren reached six years old. My father’s parents died when I was nine months old and my parents told me the story of how I was carried across their caskets before their graves were sealed as a tradition that I never came to fully understand. I guess I refused to understand because I did not ask further questions. But then again, maybe I know that they will answer my question with an answer. I believe that questions should be the answer to each question because I believe that this would not end. Because I am always amazed by the recurrent realization that the dictionary is an index of words designed with the purpose of defining them by using the words themselves. As if by being another person several times, I define myself.

So when I say “distance” what I really mean is “intimacy” and “knowingness.” I learned that we all approach things through a web of relationships and never by approaching itself directly as a thing-in-itself. Not because it is impossible to perceive it as it is. Such as a chair is a chair not because we use it to sit but because we know that the idea of a chair exists so we can sleep soundly at night.

From this, I learned that one of the fundamental fears of man is realizing that we have created everything to cope with the absence of things. That the idea of knowing that there only is nothing can crush us under the absence of its weight, that who we really are is only based on what other people have already created, that all that we do is far from finding a luxury from anything other than living, because we know that the only luxury we can have, and be satisfied with, is the chance of not having to be born.

I told this to the city after I went out on the first day of the year. It was early morning. The streets are covered with fog or smog, but I did not care enough to even make an effort to tell the difference between the two.