For days when you have nothing

Here's the thing: your brain is never empty, even when it seems like it.

Oct 10, 2022

Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈

I have nothing.

I push the door of my brain wide open, stomp on in like I own the place (only an unspecified number of payments left!), and find it empty.

Depressing.

Terrifying.

There is nothing in here.

“Hello?” My voice is small, shy, and apologetic. “Is there anyone here? Yoohoo!”

Nothing moves. There is the quiet oppression of dead air touching me. A stillness that I find unnerving, but also familiar. I am conscious of the feel of the duffle bag in my hand. The pure anticipatory weight of it.

My brain is empty and I have nothing. It’s not the first time this has happened.

“It’s just me,” I say. “Hello again. I’ve come for the rent.”

This room is usually so full and bustling with tenants going about their business. Bright and shiny thoughts constructing their illegal bookshelves, growing questionable greenery in bathtubs, and keeping pets even though they don’t pay the extra fee. I like to visit so they can put a face to the harvest. To show that I am amiable and fair. I like to fix their plumbing and listen to their grievances. I like to be a good brain landlord.

And I like to kidnap them.

One at a time. That’s what the duffle is for.

I should’ve stuck to the word harvest just then. I didn’t mean to say kidnap. That makes what I do—hey, what WE ALL DO in the privacy of our brains—sound like a crime.

“Hello, sorry! Did you hear that? I didn’t mean kidnap. It’s reward time. I’m taking one of you to the park! For ice cream!”

Idea reaping is such an ugly business, but rent is rent and my mortgage, as I said, has an unspecified number of payments left. (There is no interest. Not unless you have a certain number of followers.)

“Housekeeping?” I say as if that will flush them out. I just need one. Just one to fit perfectly in this bag. I need to feel it to wriggle in there, alive and kicking. Excited to be released into the wild, to run free in the fields of the finished.

But no. The room broadcasts its silence back at me in stereo.

There is nothing. I have nothing. There is nothing here.

I feel naked now. A naked landlord asking for the rent in a cold room. I can hear myself breathing. The inhalations and exhalations snore their way to the corners, amplifying their fear.

*Sigh*

This is unacceptable. I have never cut off the electricity. The heat is always optimal. When these tenants get too steamy, I pipe in the air conditioning and spritz on demand. Anything they want, I give to them, no questions asked. Tree houses and extra windows. Topiary. I turn a blind eye to their dealings with each other.

Just one. I need JUST ONE.

It’s rent day, you thankless life energy freeloaders. Get in the damn bag!

Emptiness. Nothingness. It has a personality. It has a feel. It is the sound of a chair on a wooden floor, scaping awkwardly in the darkness at your one-person show. It is the embarrassed cough of the usher from the rear of the room. It is the stifling air in a too-small theatre. Sounds, feelings, emotions, boredom—they all bounce around your empty brain like a flea in a bottle.

The lid is off. The rent must be paid.

I have nothing.

I am vulnerable.

I am empty.

I am afraid.

I lay the duffle on the floor and sit down in this nothing room. The floor is hard, the room is large. I get to work.

I write this nothing into something.

The bag huffs softly beneath me. I smile.

It’s not something good. It’s not something great, either. But nothing, philosophically speaking, is still something.

And that something is the rent we forgive on days when we have nothing.

Or something.

What?