when i found the SPACE, it was through my closet door.
i went to my closet one night, to grab another blanket. the door swung open, the same way it’s ever swung open, the same one-and-a-half inch particle board, painted and processed, so many little wood scraps who’s transient life began at the swing of an axe, the death of one thing, and ended at a pulp factor, the life of another, swinging openly in the space opposite.
but it was not the space opposite. it was the SPACE. it was the NOTHING, the GNAWING and the ITCHING.
the SPACE, as my mind could comprehend it then, was a hallway, long enough to turn you feet into bloody nubs to walk even a nanaangstoms length upon its carpet, the carpet, so white and beige and grey and black and charcoal upon the walls, or was it pen? pencil upon the walls. writings, musings, the most intelligent gibberish like so many sigils and runes to be deciphered in the LIGHT.
LIGHT.
so blinding, so burning, so infinitely black and consuming. it was fire, fluorescent, LED, maybe incandescent or LCD, probably neon, certainly halogen, and undoubtedly, natural.
30 minutes-then 45-the birds started tweeting and stopped-then the sun left once more-before i remembered after that. the door had closed, and i stood there, still in my pajamas. i opened the door again.
and I got my blanket.
that was when I was 20, living in a loft paid for by my parents. i brushed it off. a weird dream. a fantasy. horrific nightmare
i was a fuck up, and i knew it, living off daddy’s money and an estranged mommy’s sorry-i-never-loved-you-or-your-father money.
i went to my class, to continue being a fuck-up. strange symbols on the board. words i don’t understand squiggling together and apart in one horrible sentence abomination. i went to the bathroom. for my medication.
except past the door wasn’t the bathroom, it was the VOID the NULL the ENTROPY upon the SPACE before me, stretched infinitely like the vastness of the accretion disk of Messier 87, supermassive black hole, so wide and so deep in that SPACE the mind wears thin like rubber, a band pulled so widely and so taut across a distance so sisiphysian untiluntiluntil it
s n a p s
i stood in front of the bathroom soaked in urine. i went home. that was three weeks ago. i’m here now. i don’t remember really. don’t open any doors. that’s what’s behind them.
my doors, my cabinets, my refrigerator, my toilet seats, my drawers, my battery covers, my salt shakers, my eyelids are all open. except the front door. but i’m never leaving. it won’t let me. but i control this place. it can’t find me here. i can’t talk about it any more and i’m hungry, and i’m tired, and lights have gone and my waters dry and my mind can’t, it won’t survive. please please please just don’t open any doors, stay inside, and you can’t think about can’t think about can’t think about cantthinkaboutcantthinkaboutcantthi
IT.