I feel sick - so empty, so ordinary - 'cause in my head I heard you call my name. I'm breaking down, I'm fading.
Fading / Basement
Black Holes
Amy always thought black holes were cool because they sucked things in and no one ever knew where they went. She liked to imagine alternate universes with gashes in the sky spitting out stolen energy and matter. She liked to think of black holes like the hole Alice fell into in Alice in Wonderland. There were adventures in them, fantastic places and characters. She romanticized them as being interesting, tragically beautiful.
But there was nothing beautiful about them – only tragic – because the thing about black holes is that no matter where everything goes, it's gone.
The black hole inside of Amy formed the moment she and Karma agreed to be fake girlfriends because ever since then she had been losing herself, piece by piece. Every kiss and every touch that made her head spin spun her out her own body. She was pretending to pretend to be something she might or might not be and it left her wondering who she really was.
What she did know was when she was around Karma, she felt warm as summer. She felt like lavender and stars. But she wasn't sure what the root of that was, if she was straight and the act was starting to feel too real, if she was honestly truly madly in love with Karma, or if it was nothing more than friendship of the very best kind.
But if either of the first two possibilities were correct, Karma wasn't good for her. If truth and clarity were light Karma was the root of the blackness.
After all, Karma was the reason for the layers of deceit, and those layers didn't fit perfectly together; they were lovers who should never have been together and only acknowledged that discontinuity in retrospect. From the cracks between these layers sprang the blackness. Amy was having trouble keeping it at bay, because she didn't have the tools to fight it. What's a warrior who doesn't know what she stands for?
It made her feel small, so small compared to the infinity of space. She felt like any answers she could have were out of reach, light years away in the head or heart of someone else. Still, she couldn't stop screaming, hoping they would take pity on her and give her some meaning. But for all her noise no one heard. The universe left her alone and collapsing, imploding. She was fading and disappearing and there was no one to help.
See, if black holes swallow matter, her black hole was stealing her identity. If she was Alice, there was no Wonderland on the other side.
The thing about black holes is that they exist to destroy.