Abiit Nemine Salutato
There exists a quiet void within everything. And when I say everything, I mean every thing, ranging from the commotion of the day to the inherent inactivity of the night. This void is one that fills, and it fills in more than what you can imagine – it is located within the biggest of minds and the tiniest of matter. Even atoms, the stuff that quite literally is what we and everything around us is made of, are empty.
Such omnipresence. It is a shame then, that mankind has focused on what one is full of, conveniently ignoring the fact that people are emptier than you think. Maybe it is the lack of knowledge, a completely another type of emptiness, which leads to that search. Or it is the willful ignorance of knowledge; and the willingness to stay ignorant that probably reeks out as emptiness within this ostensible life.
And I find myself engulfed by this void, and quite often it is the one companion I have throughout my days and nights. When the shadow departs in the night and the ghosts disappear in the day, it is the void that bridges me over each change. It consumes me into it and thus fills me up with what one might say are unwanted thoughts. But that’s what you think.
If the thoughts are unwanted, they aren’t in the mind. Somehow, in some way, we attract the thoughts we have. They aren’t the noise of an overworked machine which is crying for attention. Thoughts are not the ramblings of an old deranged person in an asylum. They are nothing but the observations and inferences that the subconscious carries out without even you knowing. The experiments are vivid, the environment is your life, and the subject is you.
One day you’ll be face to face with whatever saw fit to let you exist in this universe, and you’ll have to explain the space you’ve filled. If it is a god, you’ll meet him, a god who won’t be as merciful as you think he’ll be; particularly if you’ve not abided by his laws. And if it’s science, then you’d fit your workings with the help of response and stimulus; causation and correlation; and show that you abided by the laws of science and answer to the void that you had a reason. A reason to do what you did. A reason to be.
So, then, the reasoning in The Court Of The VoidTM has no room for morality. Morality, ethics, being good, is something so abstract that there is essentially no set definition of it, and hence, The Court Of The VoidTM rejects it. What it does respect, are the observations and inferences of experiments, of vivid detail, broad environment, and a specific subject.
So every night, just before I fall asleep, I am summoned into The Court Of The VoidTM and I stand on trial. My offence is to be, and I am accused of being the way I am. I stand in the witness box, and I am interrogated by someone who looks, walks and talks just like me, but I fail to accept him as me. I fight my own case against a rival who, I think is what I should be. And the judge is the empty void, who’d have me declared guilty immediately.
We rally, back and forth, with proof and assumptions; deductions and analysis. Each day my rival comes up with better arguments than before, and each day it becomes more and more difficult to prove him wrong. The case remains unsolved, and the hearing date extends for the subsequent night, every time. Every night, I live to live like me, and fight to be like me.
But it is debilitating. Each night it is tougher than ever to stand up for me, and each night my rival creeps in closer to defeat me. Each night he senses a weakening stance, a meeker argument, and each night he looks for the kill. Every passing night, my sense of me diminishes, and his sense of me thrives a little bit more.
Recently, something different happened. I realised, midway of sparring, that my rival has a case. As the case stretched onto the break of the sun, it dawned upon me that I should not be what I am.
That’s when I decided to swap positions. No, not with my rival in The Court Of The VoidTM , but with the void itself. I decided to judge myself. And that is because I judge with a ferocity which pierces through the heart of someone in front of me. And when I judge myself, the ferocity often increases, becoming monumental; if not gargantuan.
And I rule. I rule that both parties are wrong. I am not supposed to be what I am, but neither can anyone tell me what to be. I choose to be what I want. If I want to, I can choose to live in the gaps wherein I left the things we never said. I can live in the cracks which I filled with the feelings I discarded. I can live beneath the rocks where I dug the emotions which weren’t valued. If I want to, I can live in the lab of my subconscious, and analyse on its experiments. And if I want to, I can very well live within the void which allows me to do all of that, and then let it fill me up with an arsenal of vindication.
I rule that I shall be immortal, by the words that I pen and battles I pick. I shall be immortal for the cowardice I betray and the hesitance I portray. I shall be immortal for the healing I have provided and for the damages I’ve doled out. I cannot be killed in a way that matters. I shall be immortal because I cannot be killed, for I am one with the void, and the void stays. You know you are in a void. You realise you’re in a void. And if you’re anything like me, you become the void.
And that was the last hearing.
Case closed.
Abiit Nemine Salutato.