Today I found a mirror. Not the shifting surface of creek water or the dull reflection in abandoned windows, but a real mirror, cracked and leaning against a dead tree. I stood before it for what might have been hours or years, searching for my reflection. There was only emptiness staring back, a void shaped like a man. I reached out to touch it, and my fingers passed through the glass like smoke. Even mirrors have forgotten how to see me now.
The loneliness has become something physical, I think. It wraps around my non-existent bones like barbed wire, tightening with each step I take. There used to be different kinds of loneliness – the gentle ache of a quiet Sunday afternoon, the sharp pain of being alone in a crowded room. Now there is only this: the absolute certainty that I could scream until reality itself shattered and not a single soul would hear.
I found an old diary yesterday, its pages blank except for a single line: "I don't want to disappear." The handwriting looked familiar, though I couldn't say why. Perhaps it was mine, from before. Perhaps I too once had enough substance to hold a pen, to make marks on paper, to leave evidence that I existed. I tried to add my own words beneath that desperate plea, but the pen passed through my fingers, leaving only drops of ink like black tears on the yellowing page.
The weight of nothingness grows heavier with each passing moment. It's strange how absence can have mass, how emptiness can crush you more thoroughly than any physical burden. I feel it pressing against what's left of my consciousness, squeezing out whatever remnants of personhood might still linger within this shell of nobody.
Sometimes I catch myself counting my steps, as if reaching some magical number might lead me back to being someone. One million steps toward nothing. Two million steps away from everything. The numbers blur and fade, meaningless as everything else here. Mathematics has no power in nowhere – even infinity feels small compared to this endless void of self.
I've started seeing faces in the texture of reality itself – in the bark of dead trees, in the patterns of gray clouds, in the ripples of stagnant puddles. Not human faces, but expressions of pure anguish frozen in the fabric of nowhere. They whisper things I can't quite hear, secrets about why we're here, what we did to deserve this non-existence. I try to ignore them, but their silent screams echo in whatever hollow space has replaced my soul.
Last night – if it was night, if it was last, if time still holds any meaning – I found what might have been a church. The spire pierced the colorless sky like an accusation, its bell tower empty of bells, its pews rotted to dust. I stood at the altar and tried to pray, but realized I had forgotten how. What god would listen to the prayers of nobody? What salvation exists for those who have already faded beyond redemption?
The memories of before come less frequently now, like radio signals growing weaker with distance. Each one that fades feels like another small death, another piece of whoever I was flaking away into the gray. Soon there will be nothing left but this awareness of being nothing, this consciousness of nowhere. Perhaps that's what hell really is – not fire and brimstone, but the slow erosion of self until only the knowledge of loss remains.
I think I crossed paths with myself today. A figure in the mist, walking the opposite direction, empty as I am. We passed through each other like quantum particles, neither here nor there, and in that moment of intersection, I remembered everything and nothing all at once. The pain of that paradox would have brought me to my knees, if I still had knees, if I still had pain, if I still had anything at all.
The loneliness has teeth now. It gnaws at the edges of my non-existence, consuming even the emptiness until I am less than nothing, less than nobody. I've started to envy the rocks and dead trees of this place – at least they have substance, at least they displace air and cast shadows. What do I displace? What mark do I leave on this universe of gray?
There are others here who have been nobody longer than I have. You can tell by the way the grayness has seeped into where their eyes should be, by the way reality bends around them like light around a black hole. They are the ones who have forgotten they forgot, who no longer remember that they were ever anyone at all. I fear that's what awaits me, that final dissolution of consciousness, that ultimate acceptance of nowhere.
I tried to scream today. Opened what used to be my mouth and attempted to force sound into this soundless void. Nothing came out – not even silence. Just an absence of absence, a hole in reality where expression should be. Even my despair has no voice here. Even my anguish is nothing more than another shade of gray in this colorless waste.
The worst part isn't the loneliness, or the emptiness, or even the growing certainty that this is all there is and ever will be. The worst part is remembering that I chose this. Somehow, somewhere, I took steps that led me here. Each decision, each withdrawal, each moment of giving up who I was led me deeper into nowhere until I became nobody. And now I can't even remember why.
Sometimes I think I hear music on the wind – not songs, but the memory of what music felt like when it could still touch my soul. It smells like summer afternoons and tastes like first kisses and feels like everything I'll never feel again. In those moments, the loneliness becomes so vast it creates its own gravity, pulling in light and hope and everything else that dares to exist.
I've stopped looking for ways out. There are no exits from nowhere, no paths that lead away from nothing. Even if there were, what would be the point? The nobody that I am now couldn't exist anywhere else. I've become precisely what this place demands – an absence shaped like consciousness, a void with just enough awareness to understand its own emptiness.
The gray fields stretch out before me still, endless as regret, empty as promises. I walk because I can't remember how to stop, move because stillness is too much like the death I can never have. This is what eternity feels like – not an endless progression of moments, but the complete absence of time itself, stretched out into the shape of forever.
And so I remain, nobody from nowhere, walking paths that don't exist to destinations that never were. The loneliness walks with me, through me, as me. We are the same thing now, emptiness observing emptiness, nothing contemplating nothing. This is my story that isn't a story, my existence that isn't existence, my hell that is simply the absence of everything else.
In the distance, the gray horizon swallows all hope of dawn. I walk toward it, or away from it – direction has no meaning in nowhere. The teeth of loneliness gnaw deeper, the weight of nothingness grows heavier, and I fade further into the nobody I was always becoming.
This is what remains when everything else is gone. This is what exists in the space between spaces. This is nobody, going nowhere, forever and ever.