Nothing Is Ever Replacing Nothing By Soren James

One day I found myself suddenly doomed to a life of thorough idleness. An idleness so wholly encompassing that from within its grasp I couldn’t even choose to do nothing — I was forced to passively sit and have nothing happen to me. Sometimes even having to wait for that nothing to happen.

That was the worst, the waiting for nothing. I had never waited so intensely in all my life. At such times it somehow seemed there was more sitting to be done — enveloped in a shroud of aching nothingness that seemed to increase my seatedness. On occasion I would feel somehow that I was sitting for two people, sometimes looking round me to check if, in fact, there were someone beside me, also waiting. Invariably there wasn’t. The suffering was all mine. The waiting all mine.

Life continued this way interminably, unremitting in its vacant delivery of nothingness. So much so that I had, of late, begun to believe that I may never have anything to write about again — fearing that my prospective memoirs may prove to be of little account, and that my reflections on life would fail to reach beyond the mind that deliberated them.

In due course, this proved to be the case. So I ceased writing, took to my favourite chair, and humbly continued my subjugation beneath the cloak of nothingness.

Late evening of the following Thursday, as I routinely underwent the incessant, bored pressure of nothing, an incident occurred — the nothingness stopped. It had ceased and been replaced by something I was unable to identify. Having access only to my customary language of nothingness, I hadn‘t the words at my disposal to classify it.

So it was that I ignored this intruder in the hope it would go away. Three protracted and arduous hours later, it did, and left nothing and nothingness in its wake.

Once again I hunkered down in my favourite chair for the expected onslaught of nothing. But on the following Sunday, while enthralled in my blessed nothingness, something occurred. Again, I couldn’t convey what it was; all I knew was that its arrival had chased the nothing away.

Slowly, though, the nothing seemed to reassert itself over this something. Something was there, but so was the nothingness. It seemed that nothing had chased something away, and the something had become nothing.

That is, until the police arrived and asked me why I was sitting in a room with a dead person.

Suddenly my memoirs were looking up.

© 2014 Soren James

Soren James is a writer and visual artist who largely exists in London. He re-creates himself (with amendments) on a daily basis, because he doesn’t know who else to create.

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