I’ve ceased to entertain the notion that resisting decline serves any real purpose. There is a hollow space within me not dramatic, not symbolic simply present. A still, unremarkable absence. It demands nothing. It offers nothing. It simply exists, like erosion, or the slow settling of dust. At times, it grows. At other times, it recedes. Occasionally, I experience what might resemble stability a momentary sense of cohesion. But I no longer mistake that sensation for something lasting. It is merely temporary, like everything else.
The void returns without spectacle. It emerges in moments of stillness when the distractions fall away, when memory stirs but fails to move me, when I attempt to assign meaning and find none. This, I’ve come to understand, is the natural state of things. There is no hostility in it, no tragedy just the quiet indifference of a universe that never promised understanding or permanence. I no longer seek solace, nor do I chase despair. Both are reactions rooted in the same illusion: that there must be something more.
There is nothing to extract from this absence, and I no longer expect anything to appear. Perhaps this is all that life ever was a body continuing because it hasn’t yet stopped. A mind conditioned to interpret noise as narrative. And a gradual awareness that even our most intimate attachments memories, identities, convictions are subject to erasure, not because they are flawed, but because impermanence is the only constant. Not mournfully, not angrily simply as fact.
