On Nothing

It was a five-round, two-inch .38 Chief's Special with the grips removed.

Today, it awoke me before the sun rose and it kept me awake. It's Sunday, and my day off, so I didn't mind that it'd awoken me, but I'd forgotten what it was like, especially in the dark, when everything is hidden.

"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it you have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence--even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself."

The officer's heel cut into my right calf. I lay face down in the grass and I remember thinking that the grass had grown into my nose. That the blood on my face, from my hands, from the wound in my best friend's chest felt remorselessly cold.

When it returns, I am frozen. I think about nothing and then everything, and then nothing again and then everything. My heart rate slows. I am cold. I think about butter. I say "Butter!" because when you start thinking about nothing, everything inside of you becomes dark, relentlessly. Your organs are replaced with nothing because you are so small and nothing cannot be contained.

"The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"

At first, I laughed because I'd just shot my best friend, twice, in the chest, and he'd flown back into a tree and then onto the ground. And it seemed like a joke, like on Candid Camera. His breathing became shallow and since it was cold outside, I saw tiny clouds of his breath flood from his mouth and I thought of factories. And no one jumped out from behind the tree, shouting, "You're on Candid Camera." I put my hands on the hole in his chest, and he looked up at me and I saw that he was not there. His blood was giving off tiny clouds too, and then my high disappeared, and I knew what I'd done.

"Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate confirmation and seal?"

--The greatest weight.
Nietzsche

Although I'd like to forget what happened, I can't. It haunts me. It comes to me again and again, when I least expect it. When I'm happiest. When I'm watching a movie or reading a book. And each time, it's slightly different--it's not as cold as I remember, or my friend didn't fall back into a tree, but a bush, or the officer stepped on my left calf and I wasn't face down in the grass, but in gravel, and I was breathing in stones. Sometimes, I wonder what really happened and sometimes, I'm thankful that it's just a memory that slips further into fiction.

I've learned a lot from my actions and I'm certainly a different person than I was twenty years ago. I don't know how I'd answer Nietzsche's question. Life can go in so many different directions. There are countless possibilities. All of which are beautiful and terrible and worthwhile all the same.

Or so I'd like to believe.