Anokathis

You must understand  -  it wasn't my fault. If only you would let me explain, then I can prove to you that I had no part in this. And even if I did, could you really blame me? I would say, completely honestly, that I had played my part well. 

What?

No, that wasn't a confession. All I'm saying is, isn't it beautiful, what we have become? A million feelings knotted together into one, interlinked like daisy chains, that we tirelessly try to condense into words. Horrible. I don't like talking; no phrase in any language could ever sum up how I feel. 

My heart used to be a rock of many caverns, all complex and precise, but now it is purely light. My heart is light. I am weightless. Here, it is dark - this hole torn open with jagged fingernails in the centre of the universe - but the darkness echoes to become light. It is ours, for as long as we need it, as long as we want it, and I do; I do I do I do want it. Even if you don't. 

There is beauty in simplicity. A lack of cutting edges, brick or stone, orderly laid out for the purpose of our containment. No sky ceiling, pale as the dying Earth we destroy, to order us when to sleep, to wake, to love. No outlines, no limits; none of that. Let me feast. Allow me to breathe in the citrusy - sweet smell of nothing. Of light. 

You cannot blame me, for what has occurred is nothing. No, it is not my fault - but I almost regret that it wasn't.

The sun fell heavy on my shoulders, my skin drinking it in, as I bathed in its dying embers that threatened to illuminate the lake's mirror - bright surface in flame. Its beams cut through me like a scalpel, a scalpel so innocuously tender I yearned for it to slice me up indefinitely. My heart, not quite then light, pined for destruction, and I knew it was coming. Crawling upwards from the soles of my feet, disseminating temerity throughout my whole body, a smile reached my jaw and tugged at my lips. Before me, as I meandered, for the first time in my existence completely aimlessly, a river rambled alongside, stretching his dark arms endlessly into the pool of the lake. 

In the centre, a lone white swan floated, its snow-pure feathers bearing the possibility of outshining the sun, if only the light radiating from its elegant plumes did not drop and immediately become absorbed in the endless murkiness as soon as it touched the surface.

It was still. I was still. My heart ceased its clamorous persistence, my lungs evaded their tireless duty. I felt oddly at ease, a feeling strange enough to make me anxious. The swan had two eyes, yes, like any regular swan; but this swan’s eyes were two black beads, deep and unfeeling like obsidian. And, most strangely of all, they were still. They seemed to exist, not as organs of sight, but as mere decoration, as if seeing was not a necessity.  From this, I could tell that this swan was not regular. Or, worse still, that I was not regular, for I felt the swan’s gaze inside me.

It was then, in the first moment of nothing, when Time appeared. I felt Her presence at my side, breath heavy down the nape of my neck. I knew She was there before She spoke. Her voice was cold, yet I did not shiver as I would've done, once.

"It is not done."

I turned to look at her, unable to conceal the contagious grin mutilating my face.  "I know."

Her face was inert in expression, but never in dynamics; an eyebrow was incessantly twitching, blue eyes blinking rapidly, wide nostrils flaring. I tried not to let it bother me, though it always did.

"Why not?" She asked imperiously.

"Because," I explained, deliberate,"I didn't want to."

Her expression faltered, morphing into a malformed sneer; a palimpsest of cruelty. Still, my heart was stagnant. Usually, by then I would've crumbled, would've begun to care, but Her intentions were too dark, and therefore I could not see them.

I turned my head so I didn't have to see the way Her face would melt into spasms of softness. The swan was closer to us then, rims of feathers gently brushing the bank like fingertips. My eyes hadn't noticed it move, but my bones felt it without having to look at it.

Up close, I could notice the stark poppy-colour of its beak, a cheek flushed with exhilaration. A martyr of the calm, it tilted its head, almost imperceptibly, in my direction. Our gazes became entwined. Although its eyes were dark, they were so full of light. Full of nothing. I felt the gaze press deeper inside me.

And that was when the revelation came to me: She had no power here. She never had. I wondered how I could’ve been as blind to not see something so clear.

A resplendent touch resounded at my elbow, and I flinched as though shocked.

"You left me," Time breathed. Her eyes were so gravid with what She wanted me to see that they spilled over with histrionics. They brimmed with tears that would never fall, restrained by lids that would not wait for such puny displays of emotion. I, however, saw none of it. I only saw what was real; the grass beneath our feet, scorched sickly yellow from the unrelenting summer. I saw the pines, just untouchable beyond the surface of the lake, cool and dark and inviting. I saw the way the fading sunlight palmed over the ripples of her hair, still redolent of my fingertips. I saw nothing. They were all meaningless ephemera I kept boxed away in the attic of my memory.

I felt nothing but the swan’s gaze inside me. Deep, penetrating, unfeeling - but there.

"I'm sorry." The words echoed beneath me as if they had been spoken from somewhere below my mouth. My vision expanded; I saw the world second hand, as if I had grown millions of feet tall and stood with my head in the clouds of the Earth's atmosphere, tasting the carbon settling in my mouth. I could taste blood on my tongue, but far away I could see mountains that rose and fell with my ribs and beaches that whispered with the remnants of the past.

"You left me."

Time had no power here. Her face was impersonal and had printed itself upon my heart, so it too had become universal. When it gave its last beat, it would die and rot, but its final resting place would not be my chest; it would be removed and given back to the Earth, and from it more youthful hearts could feed and grow fruitful. 

"I'm sorry."

I was not sorry. It was worse than that. I was positively melancholy at the discovery of my emancipation. I was desperate for the safety in Time's room, the comfort of Her kiss. But I knew I could not have it. I was a freed prisoner longing for the warmth of my jail bed -  the nostalgia only existed to injure me. I did not understand before then the complexity of freedom. Now everything was entirely up to me.

I inhaled and measured how long I could hold the air inside me.

One minute.

Ten hours.

Thirteen seconds.

Twenty days.

Five years.

When I exhaled, Time was still there. She was angry, seething over the surface of my consciousness like a hot gizer.

"Who do you think you are?" I noticed first the way Her voice vibrated as she spoke, smooth undulations of pitch that made it sound as if She were moving back and forth on the grass in front of me. Then, a few moments after, I realised She expected an answer. The assumption was that I could not give Her one. I was expected to spend my entire mortal life searching for a few meagre words that would satisfy Her cravings. But I knew right away what I was looking at. Somehow, I knew what I wanted to tell Her instantly.

"Me," I said.

Me. That's my favourite word. It's one that everyone knows, it exists in every language, and it sums up exactly who I am. I am no feeling, nor am I no metaphor. I am Me.

Time carried on as though She had not heard me. She had decided to become deaf until the event of my own. 

"You know nothing here is permanent. Who are you to question that?" 

The tumultuous pitching of Her voice sounded more like trembling, then.

"I have loved you as nothing ever will. And now you've gone and thrown it all away for nothing. Nothing that will be here when the light goes out.".

The bony hand that belonged to Her stretched out and squeezed mine. It knew my skin, and my own knew how it tasted. Of urgency and necessity and loss. Of lies. She embraced me tenderly.

I felt the swan’s gaze inside me. I felt the steady pulse of its heart, too. Its impulses had become my own.

A metallic fury rose from my sternum and coursed through my veins. My knuckles urged to strike Her, my body writhed to get away, but I was paralysed by fear. Her grip on me became tight and twisted, and my palm became as trapped as my mind.

The Earth around us became engulfed with a pungent stillness, the kind of lingering dampness that settles after a rainstorm, yet the sun still glowed stubbornly as it sank below the horizon. All the oxygen in the air vanished; the atmosphere was stifling with something too thick to swallow. My lungs grabbed at it, gasping, vainly attempting to turn it into something I could survive off. My desperation to live was only making me die faster. My trachea was shrivelling up into nothing more than a ginger root. Terrified, my head tilted upwards, and my eyes observed the shrouds of steel - grey clouds murkying the previously clear sky. 

It was coming, and I had brought it on. There was nothing I could do to stop it.

A fork of lightning descended upon the ground, without any thunder hurrying to mark its presence - it had been killed off by the chase. Its thrumming fingers burned impressions on the back of my retinas so that I could see them even when my eyes were closed. Its soundless existence diminished my fear. What I saw could not hurt me if I couldn't hear its message. The intricate framework of Time's hand was the most electric factor of the scene, and I could feel its heat drawing third - degree burns onto my own. It did not hurt.

A rushing wind raced past my ears. Then stillness.

Silence.

I glanced over at Time. The blue eyes were expressionless now; they had become imprinted with an unimportance that made them glassy and fixated. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

"I love you," I said.

Her quiet was a blessing I daren't have asked for.

I sensed what was about to happen before it actually did. I sensed its premonitions pulsing in my veins towards my heart. I felt the gaze of the creature on the water inside me. It was me. And I was it. I did not need to look to see it, but I turned my head anyway.

Rising from the surface of the lake, the pearly swan swelled and bloomed, a phoenix from the ashes, until it towered above us both. I did not get a chance to marvel at it. I did not bother to wonder why. I barely even had a chance to register its infinite rows of lacerating teeth as it unclamped its jaws, and in one, silky smooth motion, flung itself at Time and swallowed Her whole. Then, as if nothing at all had changed, it resumed its former shape and blinked at me benignly from the edge of the bank with its black obsidian eyes. 

I blinked back at it and began to laugh. I laughed and laughed, so consumed by wild mirth that I did not comprehend the pines in my periphery gradually slipping away, the lake drying up, the grass disappearing. Everything was slipping out from around me. Tears of joy made my vision tremble, so I closed my eyes and continued to laugh. And laugh. And laugh.

When I reopened my eyes, there was nothing. And I was here. Which is nowhere. 

I never thought anything would look like this: pure nothingness. It's so incredibly bright, but not bright like sunlight, or the pale white fixtures they use in warehouses. It's the sort of brightness you can feel in your soul when you know that, at last, you have worked hard enough that you don't have to matter anymore. You have done enough. There isn't anything else here, apart from nothing, and you and me. Which is essentially just nothing.

So don't you see? Time is dead, and always will be. She doesn't need to exist anymore. She would've understood; Her soul had grown old and ugly - She had to die. I don't know why I know. I just do. When there is nothing, you can know everything, and I know that if you chase tails, those tails will form a loop and begin to chase you. It always passes, and it never really matters.

I still feel the swan’s gaze, deeper than ever before. I know it is still here, somewhere.

I see you, fellow victim.  You are like me. You too have been imprisoned by Time’s fixtures, and that makes us close by design. But I am telling you now, you don’t have to live like this. There is another way.  I have chosen mine, and you can choose yours. I see you. 

The swan’s gaze lies deep inside you.