What are 'We' if 'I' am Nothing?

“Into the Aether,

The Space between spaces.

We submit ourselves

And forfeit our faces.

We gift you our names,

Our bones and our skin.

Return us as one,

Wyrd, make us Kin.”

As one we chant.

As one we crumble, fade and reform.

As one we become nothing.

*

Am I in a story? A memory? A dream?

Or is this reality, served on a poisoned platter perfectly preserved just for my pleasure? My pain?

The clouds boil in the sky, their rain hissing as it pours upwards as thick steam.

The air around me is so hot and dry that it claws at the cracks between my pores, tearing my flesh asunder. Even my blood refuses to be liquid, chugging through my veins and seeping from my wounds in gelatinous mockery.

Only this morning the sky was so blue. The heavens had reached down to pluck out my eyes and kiss each iris with cloudless lips, tonguing my tears like honey.

I wish I knew the sweetness of their salt now.

My ribs beat against my heart in protest, my throat eats my stomach in search of my tongue as we press on. On—to where? I have forgotten. Or I never knew.

We?

I search for them, but I am alone and inconsistent. I am here but not, there yet not, and somehow made of both.

It is just gold then grey, the line at the end of the world demarcating the rift between each. The clouds roil, the sand rolls and I lurch forward in search of anything with meaning.

I place feet in front of knees in front of hips until they all crumple like drapes cut at the precipice. Left to fall and fold, a mannequin in the ungainly hands of gravity.

I place hands before elbows before shoulders until they too fail, strings cut to the puppet, tendons snapping until I am one with the topography. A mountain unworthy of summiting, a hill not worth a home. A lid to the grave I’ve yet to dig myself.

This is not death. It cannot be, for I am hollow and death is full.—an end in time where there is no more room to be and no space left to shape.

You can only enter death complete and I am anything but.

I am made of clay, the temperature of my experience too mellow to make me solid but the perverse conscription of time too constant to leave my form a question.

A container unfit for purpose, discarded to the wastes of whatever hell this is, waiting to return to whatever grain I’m made of.

I quench myself on desert sand, seeking anything but emptiness. My insides roil. I can’t tell if it is in joy or pain or some indifference that is a torment only I can suffer.

Is indifference truly any better than cruelty? If you watch the axe fall as it fells an innocent and think nothing of it, does the scale tip? Who is to speak for their innocence?

Who is to speak of yours?

Of mine?

I roll my prone form, unaided by the bones that have become brittle and callous. Laughed at by the muscles that calcify in spite.

Eventually, once a whole dawn, day, and dusk have descended and departed, I press the blades in my back to the bed of nails beneath me and exhale at the world.

I cast myself out, a fishing line of fate aimed to sink into an ocean of options without titles. A galaxy of questions with no answers—or perhaps all the answers that hide.

It is akin to a prayer in a dredging net hoping to strike gold, or a poets attempt to cage the moon, or the simple desire for it to all go still so I can fall asleep and dream myself into a kinder place.

The thoughts of sleep awaken me to the knowledge that my eyelids are closed, sealed to the sand, hiding eyes uncertain of themselves. Since when? I cannot say.

I crack them, hinges screaming in protest as the dark and the light and all the unknown colours bleed together until I can see again.

There is the sky and the sand. I choke on both, swallowing their names to tuck them in place behind all the other words that slip my mind. But what is the space between? The abyss we live and ache in? The nihility we die in? What do we call that?

Nothing.

It just is. Nameless air to be sucked into nameless lips and caress nameless teeth that long to bite into the names of everything. If only I could remember what that consisted of.

A moan reminds me of the caverns that house my ears. Hollow caves for bats made of pitch to nest in. Sightless, restless, and undeterred by the lack of things that should but cannot, or will not, be.

Am I those things?

Am I the thoughts that intrude, refusing to knock before entering, wandering clean spaces with muddied boots until they have tracked their intent for all to see?

Am I the space between the sand that covets and consumes me, and sky that is blue or black or boiling? Am I the reason the sky is so full of rage that it throws itself with its hatred into the stars beyond.

Perhaps I am the stars. Countless, reliable to all for their presence and to few for their guidance. Loved by fewer still for their embrace.

Is the space between the sand, the sky and the stars the same? What about the distance between grains of salt in the sea? If so, does it also fill the moments between heartbeats? Is it in the darkness of a blink? Is it the memory of the exact moment you fall asleep?

Is this also my name?

If it is nothing, but a part of everything, then it must be something. We all must be.

And so must I.

Abbitaphe.

It is a whisper, a howl, a scream, and yet the bats don’t stir in the silence. It hits like knuckles, a flat palm, a kiss, but I am unbruised.

It is all, and not at all, and it is mine.

My jaw cracks open, tastebuds awakening as my teeth chew the word up and pour it from my lips.

“Abbitaphe.”

The Space between spaces retreats. My ribs still and my heart re-starts. The air has substance again. My face returns, my features shaking off the artefacts of their exile.

I take back my name, my bones and my skin.

I stand up and introduce myself to my Kin.