L'appel du vide

Photo by Kir Simakov on Unsplash

L’appel du Vide

The world is just as it is.

coffee, shuffle, April taxes,

birthday presence via Amazon,

Christmas in rotation,

the same ten meals

twenty if you’re lucky.

Moderate. Safe. Compact.

No change.

Then a bridge.

Water, expensive and endlessly blue.

The thought arrives like a courteous guest.

What if the car drank the guardrail?

Two seconds. Heartbeat spiking.

Then you laugh. Your life is fine.

That’s the first kind of void.

The void does not whisper

“Destroy yourself.”

It whispers

“What if there was more than ‘fine?’”

That’s the real disturbance.

The second kind wears a sweater

you’d never buy.

It sits at the table for one

across from your shampoo-and-trim scalp,

your nails done, your cat-fed

evening alone time

your local coffee shop humming

the same key as always."

He is aesthetically pleasing.

For one moment you imagine

the weight of another body beside you

in the bed you’ve measured to fit only you.

Not love, exactly.

The what if of being less yourself.

There is no need.

You are financially okay.

You like your coffee

Made the same way, every day.

The void doesn’t want your death.

The void wants your maybe.

And that’s the creepiest part.

You are happy enough to stay,

just unhappy enough to look over the edge

every time a bridge or a stranger

offers a different kind of gravity.

So, you go home.

You cook meal #11.

And somewhere in the dark water

below the bridge,

or in the man’s unused napkin on his table

the void smiles.

It has all the patience of a moderate life.

The void treats love as just another form

of annihilation of your current self.

You are happy enough to stay,

just unhappy enough to look.

That’s the real call of the void.

not wanting to die,

but wanting the question

to mean something.

Always, wanting the question

to mean something.

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