1) On Liminal Spaces
For all I know there is always a void.
If you ever slip on your consciousness you’ll end up roughly 32cm distanced from your reality. You’ll slip back through history and your highly evolutionized brain falls in surrender to what once was. The echoe of the animal you were supposed to be before stares back, like when you were a child, scared of the dark, scared of the land behind the next corner, scared of loneliness, the grand nothing, the void.
My first reaccuring nightmare is me sinking backwards into the moors two streets and one track behind my childhood home. My early life has been disrupted by nightly terrors and my own bed became only a reflection of what I wasn’t able to face: The dark, the loneliness, the void. When I awoke a few hours after being put to bed, again, barefoot on the creaking stairs, sonically announcing my cowardice, the little face salty and red, my mother would sigh and tell me, again, that I ought to imagine my fear as a friend in need of consolation.
Some night I suppose I stopped running from the void, turned around slowly and stood still, waiting for it to swallow me whole. Not much happened, only that I was pushed back about 32cm from my reality which unfolded as before.
At break I started watching the clouds move in the sky compulsively. I was scared of the slides, suddenly, but would penetrate my own brain with its unknowing until I got dizzy.
I started to sense that I was somewhere a little off. Somewhere hard to be met at but I was soon haunted by the place. After a careless afternoon or a surprisingly good day at school I headed back into this nothingness. My whole reality started to mimic the empty side of my mother’s bed. Mirrored back by the industrial-suburban emptiness of my childhood neighborhood and the hole inside my grandmother’s love.
As far as I am concerned there is always a void, waiting, creeping, stalking. And in a twisted manner snapping out of reality can be quite comforting. It can be almost read as some form of micro-dosed ego death, becoming all empty, no future, no past.
Across the street there is always a parking deck emptied of all cars once nightfall hits the post-war houses. The traffic light will change from red to green and shoo the asphalt-grey. No matter the type of night, you can always lie in its centre, on the back, and fathom through your own eyes that the sky is a dome. You will put your body into relation to the firmament and ponder for a little while. Then you will sigh.
For all I know the heavens are as empty as the right side of my mother’s bed.
There is always a void.
And then there is always a beyond.
2) Befriending the void
After the nostalgia of the adolescent transcendental yearn wears off, the archetypal melancholic music playing on loop somewhere stops, there is a sudden glitch and you’ll get pushed a little closer.
You’ll remember who you accidentally left on read and in the distance echoe steps of someone walking their dog. Yet something has been reset in the depths of your stomach.
True emptiness cannot be observed for too long. Its material is fleeting. A web out of whole secrets. Questions fleeing from answers.
The void is God offering a glimpse of itself in material terms. An earthly and clumsy translation. But any void can be conversed with – now that you’re there, drenched in nothing, why not ask for some divination? Once surrendered to the mystery, you are not far from looking through many illusions. The illusion of some rational, universal truth, declaring itself to be exactly that.
True truth will always honor the question mark it entails.
The void provocatively potent and alive, begging to be filled, will slowly become too hard to avoid.
From this near observant position tiny moves become recognizable and you’ll enter creative mode applying meaning. See, the area in your stomach that has been reset at this point is actually part of the void, operating from within your own consciousness.
The heavens aren’t empty anymore. They are alive.
3) Touching creation
Slowly I am being pushed into reality again. I’ve been yearning for it to recognize me and to hear my pleads. I’ve been dreaming about touching velvet and smelling incense. My body has been rotting under tension the last years. As scared as I once was of being swallowed by the void, I can barely handle the hyper-real now. I can can barely handle the ache. Painfully aware of myself in space.
Everywhere I go there’s a leopard following my every step, staring through my eyes into my soul. I am not exactly prey, more a child that has lost it’s proper way, existing somewhere half-real. It is hopeless, I must surrender to her, I must come back.
I don’t have the words to tell anyone where I have been and I doubt anyone who hasn’t would understand. I am trying to state this as neutral, without a pathos. I am unsure about my aura, yet again, but sure about where I stand.
I come back to crumble in my mother’s arms and am disoriented at every sensation I haven’t felt. Something tilts in reaction to what has changed when I was away.
I pretend with a stranger that our arms aren’t touching, sitting next to each other on the bus as I actively try to not synchronize our breathing. This is what keeps me up, the analyst never falls asleep.
…from the depths of my journal I present to you my very first blog post, thanks for reading xx