The Void

This is a time for something grand. Something new. A day, a whole life ahead of you, to move forward and progress onwards to enlightenment and a better future.

Taking your steps, looking forward to what the journey has to hold until you start to take a step. It creeps in. You feel the tendrils and thorns as they unfurl from the back of your mind, twisting its way forward in a gnarled and menacing mass of shadows and ebony claws. You watch your fears rising forward, your doubts slowly choking away the light of every dream that brought you hope and joy. You try to take a step, but the thorns are sinking in and they are salting your eyes and burning your insides and whispering the lullabies you repeat every night of the mistakes you made, reminders of how truly weak and fragile you are.

It invites you back into its depths where its safe. A static existence of silence and hollow black to numb you from the sadness, the betrayals, the crushed dreams and screaming agony that is lashing out and tormenting the very core of your being. You are weak, but no one can find you here, in this place where pain is white noise and the nothingness is your shelter. Hide away in this familiarity and withdraw the hand that’s reaching out, clinging and grasping so desperately for just a sliver of warmth that resembles love and joy. Just a small high so you know you can feel something good, that you can feel something truly wonderful.

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It’s not worth it. Just like every time before and those to come, the moment you grasp that sliver, you hold its warmth for but a second. You watch as it shrivels. As it crumbles and shrinks and fades. And in its death it is replaced with but another thorn, piercing your skin and injecting its poisons into your arteries. You are sluggish. Its hard to move. Your heart is beating at mach 5 but you can’t breath. You can’t scream. Save me from this madness! Tear these thorns from my flesh and drain my being of this toxic life that threatens to eat its way out from the deepest depths of my soul. To hollow me out till there is but a shell ready to burst. No thought. No emotion. Just listen to the whispers till even they are just as empty as the void you have embraced.

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You can’t escape this. You have given up on the thoughts of a life where just maybe you could bring some good, some meaning, to this dying world. This cruel and beautiful world. You just don’t want to hurt anymore. Be good. Fall into routine. Play it safe. Stray from this path and only death will save you from the suffering you will find. You want to live don’t you? To continue walking on the ground that you were set on.

But is this living? If in the end there is no higher being, no holy aftermath to our existence, only a cease of our being, our existence, are you not but already dead inside? Or is it even in this reservation you continue on because no matter how much you deny, there is still hope left. Hope that one day you can embrace the warmth and hold onto it. Never letting it go. And from its flames you find your strength in its burning core. Fight back the darkness with its expansive glow and turn the thorns to ash in its flames. Fight back the tendrils with its demanding presence and emerge from it anew and strong. Ready to step forward and never look back. Tear through the thorns no matter how much they rip your flesh or how deep they cut. The flames will always burn brighter than the terrors that had plagued your mind.

You will go on. You will persevere. Nothing is easy in life and to truly accomplish something magnificent, you must fight your demons. Never give in to their temptations. Hold tightly to your hope, and keep reaching out, because one day you will find a warmth that does not fade, that will not cease, that will burn for perhaps years and years to come. And from it you will be reborn, with the strength to carry purpose and responsibility, and the will to push through even the darkest days, and come out of them just as bright as you were before.