there were times as a child I would get this feeling, usually at night, of vast nothingness that was endless in time and in space and that it was so vacant that there was an audible hum. It kept me up at night.

"fish, you should write more on that, seriously." she said.

"What if it comes back?" I said to myself

What if it comes back? Truth is, it never left. I can still picture it, only now it's a distant scene, only now I can un-picture it. Truth is, it wasn't the nothingness that bothered me, it was the stillness.

The scene would be a straight view which I couldn't change because I was a part of the nothing. In the nothing with me was also an horizon which wasn't discernable but the ground was the darkest gray and the sky the blackest black, it was a demonstration of the endlessness. Directly in front of my view was a piece of string also of the darkest grey that stretched from somewhere above and ended in my field of vision, a little below straight ahead, it was a demonstration of the stillness, the nothingness.

The string was straight and motionless and if you are familiar with string which is hanging with one free end, you know this isn't possible, there is always some kink in the string, it's never perfectly straight and eventually it probably moves a bit, but there in the scene of nothing, there was no movement, there was no sound, there was no me, there was no string, there was no sky, there was no ground, there was just the large hum of never ending emptiness.

When I was young, I couldn't end it. The scene would begin and I would be trapped within, I couldn't scream, I couldn't cry, I couldn't move, I couldn't look away, I couldn't cover my nonexistant ears. I can still picture that string, which is always how the scene would begin, that perfectly straight motionless string, my fixed focus would be on the string about two feet from my view and then the quiet would just get louder and louder, my focus sharper and sharper.

Today when I picture the string, it's more distant, and the longer I look at it the closer it gets, it's as a movie set which I can start to enter, I always look away before the hum of the quiet gets too loud. Today there is something outside the emptiness but the emptiness still has all its power, it can still swallow everything if I'm drawn inside.

I stay outside.