The Abyss Stares Back

In a deep, dark corner of reality, Sen woke up in a prone position to the sound of nothing. It felt like his ears should be ringing, but he could hear no sound, only feel the pressure in his ears. His head throbbed in pain. The pressure felt like it was both pushing on his head from the outside and outward from the inside. When he moved his arms and rolled over, he could feel pain course through his entire body, as if his whole body had been thrashed by an automatic car wash with baseball bats instead of brushes. He could see nothing, and underneath him he could only feel a flat, smooth, cool surface. Worst of all, he was naked. He tried to speak, but no words came out. The sound waves from his vocal cords were simply nonexistent. He blinked his eyes a couple times, thinking his vision needed to adjust to waking up, but it soon became clear there was no light to see anything. The darkness enveloped him to the point that he couldn’t even see his finger touching the tip of his nose.

“Where am I?” Sen thought, the idea of being completely alone racing through his mind. He felt the discomfort of loneliness, but it was a different feeling than what he knew as his own loneliness. This loneliness seemed collective, as if he was feeling the emptiness of everything around him, which was ironically nothing. Normally he was comfortable being left alone, but this kind of alone didn’t only feel empty, it felt dangerous. It was cold and sharp, like a knife pressed against his own ego. Oddly, he didn’t reject it, as if deep down there was something that craved the pain in being completely alone. Sen could feel that empty need for loneliness rise from his chest up into the center of his head; eternal emptiness; a craving to be separate from everything. Sen seemed to forget about the pain in his body as he focused on that loneliness and fell into it. His eyes closed. His breath slipped away from him. He tried to retrieve it but there was no air to breathe. His eyes opened. He breathed again.

“What happened? You were just about to go to bed and then…” Sen thought quickly, trying to remember where he was before he ended up here. He remembered it was a Thursday night, he had eaten dinner and done some laundry before wrapping the night up with a couple games and going to sleep. He was a plumber by trade, having spent some time in the armed forces as an engineer, he learned a lot and left the army. He had used his skills to become an apprentice plumber and became a journeyman now in the prime of his twenties.

Memories of his simple life flooded his mind. He lived alone and had a perfectly fine social life, just as lackluster as any normal person living in America.

“They’re all you have now.” A new voice echoed in Sen’s mind. It sounded like his own voice, just like the voice he always heard in his head when he would have those daydreaming conversations with himself, but this voice came from a different place outside his mind. He pondered if there might be someone in the darkness with him, but quickly perished the thought. The voice was just like his, it had to have been a creation of his own psyche.

“What would be the point of a doppelganger if there’s not even any light to see them?” He thought. He tried to call out in the darkness again, but again came to no avail. There was only silence.

Reality weighed down on Sen’s shoulders like a sandbag covered in molasses. He didn’t know where he was, and from his own apparent reasoning, he couldn’t do anything about it. It was all very sudden, and his situation only just started to dawn on him. He was alone, there was nothing and no one around him. Where was he to go? What was he to do? There was simply nothing. There was no plan to make or execute. There was no reason to do anything. Like a wave, hopelessness devoured him. The emptiness and lightlessness of the void consumed him. Sen’s fist collided with what his mind told him was the ground, but there was nothing. What came first was anger and resolve. He could walk, he could move forward, so he had to be able to find a way out. Though the thought had crossed his mind multiple times, he quickly redirected his train of thought to something that wasn’t “an empty alternate universe.” His anger wasn’t soon to subside, but it did, and his resolve began to waver with it. After walking what felt like miles, nothing changed. There was no light, no sound, no nothing. His mind began to play tricks on him, he would think something was in the corner of his eye, or that he saw a flash of light in the distance, but he would quickly realize there was nothing. He felt like he was beginning to lose his mind. Hopelessness devoured him again, this time coming with remorse and sadness. His eyes became wetter until his face curled into sorrow. He fell to his knees, his hands holding him up until he simply rolled over, becoming a sad, naked, ball of a man in an empty dark void.

As Sen’s hysterical fit continued, his mind swayed from hope to dread and back again, over and over. The black, empty space wasn’t doing much for his sanity. He would get up and walk a few steps just to come sobbing to his knees over and over again. After what seemed like hours of dread and hopelessness, Sen simply couldn’t cry anymore. He tried his hardest to scream but nothing came out. He couldn’t even tell if he was breathing anymore.

“This must be it then.” Sen thought. “This is where we go at the end. Exactly what I thought it was: Absolutely nothing.” His mouth made the action of scoffing, but no sound came out. He feebly stood up. His whole body felt weak, as if his will to live was abandoning his physical faculties. He attempted to take a step before losing his balance and falling on his face. He could see nothing, hear nothing, and there was no real physical space around him for his body to abide. He shakily rose to a kneeling position and closed his eyes again.

“But I’m not dead, am I?” He tried to remember what happened before he was placed here but couldn’t remember anything past crawling into bed after playing some video games.

“I don’t think I died… I don’t…” Sen collapsed mid-thought, falling unconscious.

Some hours later, Sen woke again to the black dreariness of this space. Waking to the bleak emptiness a second was less jarring, but still uncomfortable. Sen didn’t feel rested, it seemed being unconscious in this place did nothing to help him recover from stumbling through the blackness while hysterically trying to make sense of it. He closed his eyes, more as a habitual practice of focus rather than blocking his sight. He attempted to calm his mind. After what he had assumed the last day had been, Sen’s mind was exhausted and delirious. If sleep couldn’t help him, he had to figure out if this place was a constant downward spiral or if there were any positives he could latch onto.

Sen sat cross-legged in a classic meditative pose. He hadn’t done this in years and felt discomfort in his hips, knees, and lower back, but attempted to block out the discomfort to meditate on his situation.

“Just the basics, I’ve got me, I’ve got my mind…” Sen’s mouth curled upwards as he tried to account for what he did have rather than what he didn’t. He felt a chilling gust come from nowhere, the battering of the gale in his ears was the first sound he heard in some time, as unwelcome as it was. Sen gritted his teeth against the cold as the gust subsided.

“The hell was that?” Sen said aloud, though no sound left his lips. “There was something, meaning it’s not all nothing, right?” He thought, as he stood up from his cross-legged position to his feet and started walking.

Days past, Sen was sure of that. He felt no hunger save for a few fleeting moments where he felt insatiable, which he was accounting to insanity rather than true hunger. The cold in this darkness was getting colder, but he seemed to be getting accustomed to it. He would walk, and as it got colder, he would sit to meditate on it. It seemed to him that when he tried to think positive thoughts, the darkness would strike him, either with extremely cold gusts of wind, or by dropping the floor from beneath him, letting him fall for a ridiculous amount of time before catching him again in its cold embrace. When he tried to do the opposite and deprecate himself, the darkness would do the same. After several rounds of stubbornly fighting the obvious, Sen resorted to simply clearing his mind, attempting to recreate the void that was around him inside his mind. Sen realized it was finally time to embrace it.

It proved a challenge for Sen to actually think about nothing. His mind always wanted to try to remember something in his memories that would stimulate him. An active mind was not what he needed, he surmised through trial and error, as his mind would become more active, the void became colder and harsher. When his mind would find a resting state, where he didn’t create any thoughts or images, the void would react, getting colder and numbing his body.

Sen adopted a routine of walking, meditating, and sleeping, or at least attempting to. He would endure the bleak conditions of the void and moved on to meditating in a cross-legged position, attempting to control his mind. “No spoon.” He would think to himself every time he would begin his meditation. Despite his intention, even the attempt to think of nothing proved to be an action, and the void let him know. Whenever it seemed like he was trying too hard, the icy breeze would kick up, prompting Sen to start walking again.

The time he had spent in pure nothingness was now a mystery to him. He could have been there for a couple weeks, maybe a month at most, but after a few attempts to sleep and not being able to, he gave up and everything started to blend together. Several times now he had tried to scratch tallies into his arms or the back of his hand or the top of his thighs to have a reminder of the times he meditated, but no matter how hard he pressed into his skin, it wouldn’t break. After the pressure subsided from his fingernails against his own flesh, he could feel nothing but cold air around him.

Eventually, he was able to think of nothing. Though, he knew now it wasn’t thinking of nothing, it was not thinking altogether. Clearing his mind wasn’t an action, but a lack thereof. He would start his meditation by cutting off all stimulation from every physical sense and then carefully moving that focus subliminally to his mental acuities, effectively shaking his mind like an etch-a-sketch. At first, he could maintain the blank state for only a scant few seconds, but in those seconds he felt the pressure of the void turn from a cold weight pressing down on him to almost a warm embrace. The feeling was euphoric after being in cold oblivion for so long.

“I get it, thank you.” Sen thought, assuming the void would hear him. Despite the unwelcome chill and the loneliness of the space, Sen came to realize it was both his greatest enemy and closest friend, while also being neither. After walking for so long, he knew it to be infinite.

“At least, I don’t think I’ll reach the end of it, so it might as well be, right?” A smirk crossed his lips, one of a few in the last couple days, and the cold wind berated him once more.

Sen’s mind had evolved since his abrupt transportation into the void. After weeks of mulling over things in his head, he had nothing left but to accept where he was and he might be stuck there for a long time, if not forever. The fleeting questions of why he was there and how to get back were barely even memories now. He no longer tired or felt the sting of the cold. His walks became shorter and shorter, until the winds no longer buffeted his back and all that was left to do was meditate. He now sat cross-legged with his eyes wide open, no longer needing the habit of closing his eyes to descend into his trance-like state that became his meditation.

He realized while being mindful in his meditations that his mind had to go somewhere, not just cease to operate. It had to be given a task that was invisible. The idea wasn’t a trick of the mind, it felt more like a secret pathway around his thoughts that was hiding in plain sight all along. Eventually, he was able to envision the simplest of objects while maintaining his embrace of the void: A solid black orb, slightly lighter than its background of complete darkness. This revelation, that it was possible to create concepts even when there was no generative thought or causal reason for them to happen, was the turning point that sent Sen’s morale boosting upward. It was only a thought, but he was able to create something out of nothing. He felt a wave of tempered glee rush over him, warming his bones. He expected there to be a rush of icy wind berating him from feeling such positive thoughts, but as he waited, he realized he couldn’t feel any wind because he was surrounded by water.

He felt like he had been sitting there for hours, possibly close to a day, but as his mind came out of his void trance, he could feel the icy sting of water flowing around him. He wasn’t breathing and he didn’t feel as if he needed too, but dread quickly overcame him as he realized the water wasn’t flowing around him, he was diving through it, and he was going straight down.

The idea of going deeper meant that it would become increasingly more difficult, if not impossible, to get back out. Sen knew this and a stricken panic enveloped him when he suddenly felt the need for air. He tried to swim upward but the pressure of the deep water kept pulling him down. He couldn’t even see where he should swim to and stopped fighting it when hopelessness hit him once more. This new hopelessness was much different from what he felt when he first fell into the darkness. He felt no agony or remorse. He simply understood there was no hope, and he promptly accepted it. He didn’t need hope anyway. After existing in this place, unable to sleep for what seemed like more than a month, hope was no longer something that he wanted or considered an option. He finally accepted it.

His mind became fuzzy. He hadn’t needed to breathe at all in this place until now, where water surrounded him and gave him no option to do so.

“Of course it’s ironic. With nothing to lose, all I am is everything I have.” Sen thought. He sniffed in some of the water through his nostrils to test it, nixing any idea of the void trying to trick him. The water was not breathable. He coughed out the remaining air in his lungs as the water went into his sinuses and down the back of his throat. He could feel his mind shutting down. He lost the feeling in his hands and feet. He could feel it now, his mind drifting into an eternal rest.

“Alright, then. I’m all yours.”

Sen’s mind went blank.