Sixteen months, since my whole reality shifted. I have been trying the entire time. From the outside it does not look like it. From the inside, most days, it does not either. Nothing under my control. Not the day, not the plan, not the people. When that happens, the world stops being a place you live in and becomes weather you wait out. I kept reaching for the edges of my own life and trying to find air.
Trying and trying, adding up to nothing. Nothing done, nothing that worked, nothing to show, you can think about it forever knowing nothing can be changed. There is absence. In all our lives sure, a hole — not visible and not small. We all just run so violently at them like all the duct tape in the world is going to go extinct if I don’t grab it first, might fix it. Absence. Null. Void.
An object sits in a room. Light falls on it, and on everything, in all directions. Whatever it lands on, it bounces back to my eyes, and eureka, I can see. Whatever the object cannot take in, it throws back. The form, the whole of what you can know about an object, is that refusal: the boundary of what it refuses to let inside.
Behind the object, where the light could not reach, obstructed by it, there is a shadow. Black. Dark. Is it nothing? A shadow is not an absence. It is the inside, seen from the outside — the interior of a thing that lets nothing through. You get the outline, and a dark shape on the floor.
Nothing passes through an opaque object. Not light. Not anything.
Now take a glass, still an object in the same path of light — but clear, transmissive, receptive. By its nature it lets the light pass through the body that the other one refused, and out the other side. And now something else arrives, thrown across the floor in patterns never seen before — the light, having passed through, telling you what it found in there.
The shadow is still there. It has only changed sides. It is no longer the only thing the object gives you. Those patterns were always inside it — they were never the glass’s idea. The glass just lets itself receive the light.
Maybe I have spent a long time being an object that does not let light through? From the outside: a form, a shadow, a shape you can describe but never enter. Nothing passes. Nothing shows. You would be right to think there was nothing in there.
But nothing done is not nothing there, right? The patterns are inside. I just have to let the light through.
So — what is void? The absence of everything, or the presence of nothing? Hold up a glass to the light, pour some apple juice. What do you see in the shadow?