She is alive. Probably, maybe, perhaps. Definitely perhaps. Perhaps definitely. Her mind buzzes and whirls and tinkers in the same way it always has — although, admittedly, with a tad more adrenalin — with stupid overlapping thoughts and emotions and memories. Memories, memories. Blonde hair, brown eyes, pale face. Once, her own. Now? She is unsure. It is odd, being unsure about your own face. She had never before realised how comforting self awareness really is. Now, she has none, and misses it keenly.
In the void, there is and was and never will be anything. No time ticks by, no air hits skin, no light escapes. Although her mind is whirling, twirling, curling, she feels terribly numb. She feels no limbs, no torso, no hair on her neck. She is sure that her heart must be thumping, her hands must be sweating, but the expectation does not correlate to her current reality and she feels the terrible feeling of feeling nothing at all. She could be floating. She could be upside down. She could have no body at all. The fear of this never quite fades.
She used to scream for hours on end. Well, she thinks she did. The intent in her mind occurred, of that she is certain, but she never heard it, never felt it, never regretted it as her throat burned and her voice broke. The intent to scream, she has found, does not give the same satisfaction of a fully experienced scream, and so she had stopped screaming long ago. Crying has been a similar scenario. Once, her tears were uncontrollable, a nuisance of her day to day life. Now, she longs to weep.
Time here is oddly formulated. She still has a then, a now, and a soon, but they are less rigid than they once were. Less important. The only true then was her life, her true existence, when she saw skies and smelt vinegar and had beads of sweat on her brow, her back, her neck. The only now, is this. It is deceiving to describe it as darkness, but difficult to describe it as anything but. The darkness does not feel the same as the darkness that she had once faced. She had always known that behind the darkness, life still stood. In her old reality, darkness was a simple absence of light. Now, darkness is is so much more. There is nothing underneath it. There is nothing even hiding in it. There is no one, nothing, never ever ever ever ever. There are no scary squeaks of floorboards, no heart wrenching shadowed silhouettes. There are no gasps, there are no tears. She longs for danger. The monotony of her existence is far, far scarier.
More terrible than this, perhaps, is her future. It is the same, and somehow the knowledge of what she will be living through is worse than her living through it. This oblivion is forever. No escape. This, itself, is not the truly abhorrent thing—but rather, her shocking, painful awareness of it. The memory of breathing when you no longer breathe is a painful thing. Sometimes she feels breathless, helpless, hopeless, as if having a mental panic attack but not once does any sort of relief come. She doesn't black out. She just continues until the hormones in her brain calm, and her thoughts become coherent. There is no relief of the sharp finish, no promise of a better day tomorrow morning. There is simply the unending constant of her own self. She hates it. She hates all of it.
She tries to distract herself. In fact, it is all she does. She immerses herself in memories of happier times, of adventures and running and innocent kisses that are too short, too few. She was in love, once. Hopelessly, hopefully, in love. She tries to imagine him now, his face, his eyes, his body, but it fades. She cannot remember the sound of his voice, nor the way he walked, or the way he smiled when the sun hit him just like that, whether his eyes creased or his cheeks dimpled or his teeth showed. The only memories she has of him are sinfully vague. The feeling of running her hands through his hair. The sound of his footsteps. The curve of his neck.
The man that once so ruled her heart is now becoming resoundingly absent from her mind. Theoretically, this hurts. Truthfully, it is hard to care.
She remembers other things, though. She remembers the child with startling red hair that once smiled shyly at her when she saw them in a shop. She remembers the sharp sting of shampoo in her eyes. She remembers playing hopscotch as a little girl, leaping from one number to another with no abandon, head chucked back as giggles overpowered her small body. She remembers the smell of her mother. The faint lingering of cigarette smoke, despite her insistence that she had not had a smoke that day. The overpowering scent of the cheap perfume she had bought as a birthday present for herself. This, she longs for. More than anything, she wants a hug from her mum. Wants her to say that everything will be okay. Wants for it to be true. But it seems she has run out of wishes.
Instead, the silence screams at her. Once, she thought she had known silence, but she hadn't. Not like this. She wishes she could hear voices, real or imaginary, but they never come. Or if they do, she does not hear them.
And so, she stays. In the void, and integrated into the very fabric of the universe, of all the universes. The essence of who she is has become part of everything, of everyone. She is in the moment when you wake up not feeling your arm. She is there when your ears pop, when sound drags and lies and muffles. She is the tiny pause between each step, the hesitation before speech, the empty space that dominates atoms. She is nothing. And nothing can never die.