Nothing II

I wake to a knock.

The room is dark, and I am dazed.

The rapping is at my bathroom door.

Uneasy, I plant both feet on the hardwood floors. I rise and move forward, but there is nothing out of the ordinary on the other side.

A toilet. A shower. My mirror.

I stop.

Double-take.

It can't be...

The mirror on the wall showed a reflection that wasn't my own. It was my mother's. And my father's. And it was their mother's and father's, to infinity. Upon closer inspection, the mirror wasn't mine, either. I had never seen it before.

It was round—oval-shaped, I guessed. Poised vertically, not horizontally. Its frame was wood, I thought. But it was painted gold. The wood beneath the gold paint was embellished with carvings of flowers and vines.

I then realized, when looking away from the reflection that wasn't mine, there was no floor beneath me. I was standing, somehow, someway, though I couldn't see my legs either. Nor my feet. Nor my hands, once I tried looking for them.

In fact, the mirror had to have been hung from something, for it was hanging in front of me, but I couldn't see a surface. That's not to say the room where I stood was black. I wasn't sure that I could even call this space a room because there was nothing other than a mirror hanging in the void.

Where did the toilet go? The shower?

The space felt small, yet expansive at the same time. It wasn't dark, but there was no light around me. Besides a reflection in the mirror that I could only infer to be my own, there was nothing. There's a difference between darkness and nothing, but explaining so would be an impossibility.

I did not know what day it was. Nor did I know the time. Nor did I know how long I had been staring in the mirror. I didn't even know who I was anymore. Had millennia passed? Or had I only been standing there for 30 seconds? I had no way of knowing. There was no clock. If there was, I don't know if I would have even been able to read it.

Maybe it was me in the mirror, and I just didn't recognize myself. Ever-changing. Man. Woman. Neither. Both.

It was silent. Though I wasn't sure I knew what noise was anymore. Maybe it was very loud, and I just could not hear it.

The mirror before me froze.

It glitched.

The image being reflected was suddenly showing many different faces stitched together. A collage of humanity.

The glass cracked where each piece adjoined. Beneath the cracks in the glass was something different entirely. Something I remembered, but something that felt so new.

It was bright. Hot. Fire.

The images of facial features disappeared as cracks in the glass took their place, opaque. Light poured out from beneath the fissures.

It was still silent, but the silence was loud.

I was overwhelmed by the bright light. It seemed to have been blasting toward me. Out of the mirror - it was coming.

Yet, I felt it pulling me in. My body, though I didn't see one attached to my consciousness, felt like spaghetti. I was stretching. Moving at speeds I'd never imagined possible.

The farther I traveled, the smaller I was in the scheme of things.

Around the strip of light from which I traveled was the nothing. The dark, for lack of a better word. But it was not dark; it was nothing.

I continued to travel for centuries—or seconds; I couldn't tell time —before light condensed. It was focused on a singular point, and my once long, noodle-like, celestial body retracted into itself.

I was struggling to breathe.

I focused on the light. The bright light.

I had become one was the darkness.

I was the nothing.

I had separated from being.

I was chasing existence.

I couldn't move, for I was only thought, but my thoughts pushed me forward. Into the light. It was round. It was hot. It was fire. I needed to break through.

All of a sudden, it was no longer silent.

I gasped.

I was crying.

I couldn't control my crying.

It was loud.

It was too loud.

There were machines.

Beep. Beep. Beeping.

And sobs.

There was banging on a window.

There were people yelling.

"Let me in!"

"We're losing her!"

"Keep trying!"

"Clear!"

The bright lights above me came into focus. They were oblong and attached to a ceiling. The ceiling was made up of many squares. The people holding me were wearing blue. Everything was blue. Blue masks. Blue hoods. Blue suits.

I was still crying.

I was floating.

I was reaching out toward the oblong pillars of light.

Then, I saw them.

Tiny. Pudgy. Wrinkled. Reddish-yellow. Wet. Bloody.

Hands.

Baby hands.

A woman stuck a tube up my nose.

The tube sucked liquid out of my lungs.

It burned.

Fire.

I cried harder.

"I don't think I can bring her back. She's lost too much blood." The voice wasn't so much of a yell anymore. But it was still so loud. Everything was hectic.

Then I saw her. Lying on the hospital bed. She was unresponsive.

My body felt as though it were on a cold metal table. A person touched my head and used a ruler to measure my body.

My head was cocked to the side as I watched myself.

My grown, adult self.

My 9-months-pregnant-but-not-so-much-anymore self.

Lying on a hospital bed.

I was wearing a gown. My skin was pale. White as a sheet. White as the light. There was a pool of blood, drip-drip-dripping to the floor.

"I think we should call it. Console the father." The man's voice got more distant with each word.

The room got quieter.

I couldn't feel myself crying anymore.

The light started to fade.

I blinked.

Everything got dark.

No.

It was nothing.