Empty Places

Nothing has belonged to me since the last catastrophe. That is how I remember you—somewhere, somehow, I will cradle you in my arms until the flesh falls from my bones. Your head against this cage of encased marrow, you will feel the warm blush of my heart one more time. One more time? Crossing your path just one more time would kill me. I swear we just needed more time.

Fuck it. I drive another fifteen hours on these roads. No one else in this world is awake. My bare shoulders blistering, salt-sweat sliding like crystal down the neck; but the desert sun is dimming now, its ocher cast yawning. Sagittarius grips the sky. Silhouettes of Joshua trees, the faint smell of far-off rain, midnight passing with the brevity of blessed eternity, all mist and shadow and passage of time. And then the conflagrations of dawn, burning beneath their webs of golden thread and their crusts of shattered amethyst; those dearest entwined figures in my rearview mirror stir, and the world comes alive again in wildflowers and briar thorns. Each gnarled cactus that coils like a garland on the earth’s grave, its blossoms wilting like a sun fixed on Gibeon, recalls some kind of music in a rough minor key. Flesh-seeking carrion birds, spiraling and savage, rendered bemused by my pecked-clean bones. Valleys where nothing lives or can live, the pitching, gaping jaws of the Pacific, the ragged mountain ranges that glint in yellow moonlight like tilled fields of broken teeth–I saw the empty places of the world.

I am describing where I was. I cannot describe what it felt like. Finding the ends of my knowledge in dirty fingernails and knotted hair, unable to connect and unable to be alone, suspended in a perfect stillness, that purgatory of human company. I saw the blood-red sun beyond the rust-tinged rim of the world. I saw the dark corners of damp-stoned alleyways. I saw bars where ashtrays were cleaner than glasses. I found the empty places, and I saw myself in them.

*

We all contain multitudes. But I contain more than I’d like.

In the crystal-shard haze of the last long years, I became a somnambulist, a desecrate voyeur, a tourist of worlds and of lives. I swam the dark waters of the minds that were not mine. I paced the cobwebbed corners of their longings, strayed through impure facets of their fears and immeasurable needs.

And yet, I am empty. I watched atheists make idols of lovers, saw witches climb crosses of penance, and I studied their motives and I wondered at their faults. But I refused to take, to ask, to try. I eschewed the desire to fill myself with them, to make myself whole as a patchwork of false pretense. I did not connect. I never came close. Everything I earned, I earned alone.

I don’t think it was wrong. What I did, what I was. I built a life knowing— knowing exquisitely, knowing inherently—that I was soon to leave it. Because I didn’t want it. Because it almost killed me.

Especially her. I was reflected in her sickness. Her self-flagellating emptiness. It shattered my being. Still, I have longed for her mind, I have missed the way that it flashed against mine. Does she still wear that necklace of jade? I carried it back from what sanctuary I found in Spain. In the sweetness of our final nights, I felt its chain-link impressions, caressing my fingers, caressing her throat. I wonder what she did with it. I wonder what I would have done. After all, I am not healed just yet. My own grim soul is still the raven’s claw, extended, desiring to expose that other one’s loathsome bones, to strip clean the filth which drove that hallowed soul away from me.

A girl with dark hair, a gaze to splinter glass, a mind that astonished me, and a love I wish I could have kept alive. Loving her taught me what loss meant. Or losing her taught me what love meant. You and I know that there is no difference, or maybe a difference that we do not know, because any and either and every way we played it, loving and losing and language, for us, were always inherently the same. So all of that faded, and I faded from it, and now I must make something from what I have. This was my choice, my consecration, my last card to play.

Writing, for me, is like traveling in that dirty, run-down old camper. Contingent not upon the places, but upon the vast expanse of in-between. Not on the journey—on the nothingness. Not on the unspoken—on the redacted. The clandestine. The lack.

I have always needed a new beginning. But this isn’t a beginning. This is an emptiness. This is an absence, at the center, and it pulses like a grief-sickened heart. It consumes. It eats the month of July, swallows August, gnaws away at the dry edges of September. Autumn, once the season that cradled and consoled me, is diseased now. I can smell rainwater and seared skin and loss. I can feel synesthetic terror and some life between my legs. I can see shame and blank white walls, those rooms void of meaning where my mind made war upon itself. My autumnal victory was pyrrhic. Of course it was. It had to be.

So I relapse, into writing, into life, into this, for the same reason that I do anything. The same reason that I do everything. This incendiary absence at my core is as hyperbolic-maudlin-absurd-indulgent as it was when I was sixteen—but it is still here. It will not leave me. And so it remains the only thing that never left. My nothingness is all that I have to lose.

Look at me. At my best, I am a corpse, impaled upon my adolescence. Crucified by those who left. When I lost them, I lost my mind. And then, of course, I lost everything. There was nothing else to do. So what could there be, upon this earth, that I am still afraid to say?

But there must be something. Unspoken, unrealized. Because I know when my words are empty. I’m not willing to face some weakness, some fault line in my apathy. I can hardly understand how I allowed myself to become this way. Desolate, undone, I would tear myself apart to take new form. But I was born without, and that is the point. Nothing, nothing is my own. Absence is my birthright. I possess it in excess. I am fantastically solitary. I move beyond fixity. I love myself so that no one else need bother.

Perhaps that is what I am too afraid to think or say–that maybe I made a better spectacle than I ever did a person.

I am, in short, a labyrinth of my own design. Pacing my own vacant hallways, erecting my own idle crosses, inventing my own hollow edifices, awaiting my own stillborn birth. I am the empty place.

I had not planned for it to be this way. I had something better in mind. I don’t remember it now.