#emptiness

[verpasstzuleben]

It was good for a while, being empty. I didn't hurt anymore. But as time went on, it was like I could hear myself from far away, begging for permission to come back.

— Myra McEntire, Hourglass

[mermaidinthedeepocean]

[feral-ballad]

Victoria Chang, from Obit

[Text ID: “To be empty and so full.”]

[memoryslandscape]

An emptiness so vast I can't tell if I am in it or it in me.

Richard Jackson, from “Elegy Just in Case,” Asheville Poetry Review (2022)

[sa-dnesss]

I do not like who I am. There is nothing good about me anymore. I am sick of wasting my time. I am worn out, I am really tired.

there is no point of me being here if I am not doing anything useful

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

Eyes of the Spider (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1998)

[hand-in-unloveable-hand]

on emptiness and craving death

[ norwegian wood, murakami // photographic portraits behind the canvas by luca pierro // angels in america, tony kushner // little beast, richard siken // don’t know // the juryman, john galsworthy // calling the boy home, donte collins ]

[hauntedbythenarrative]

Prelude, Brynne Rebele-Henry//Holy Wild, Gwen Benaway

[metamorphesque]

Nickie Zimov | Gray Area 3.5, Gray Area 2.7, Gray Area 1.1

[beljar]

There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts.

Albert Camus, The First Man, 1944

[mermaidinthedeepocean]

[leonardospoetry]

It usually starts as a longing for something unseen, something unknown. Like forgetting a beautiful memory, the most precious one. All I’m left with is the space carved in my soul. Empty.

But this emptiness doesn’t have to hurt. Like the blank page offers a home to a poem, this emptiness can be the space for possibility and new beginnings. A home to the world. For this world is vast and expanding. And so is life. There’s no final destination. No ultimate point. 

To end this little musing on emptiness, I’ll share with you a quote by the mathematician Robert Kaplan that pretty much sums it up: “If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world.”

[feral-ballad]

Jennifer S. Cheng, So We Must Meet Apart; “August 24, 2018”

[memoryslandscape]

As a child, I had trouble forming friendships, and turned instead to fantasy. I could imagine myself into the books I read and, by embellishing the characters, supply myself with precisely the sorts of friends that I’d always longed for. If you have engaged in this kind of fantasizing, you know that the thrill of creativity eventually collapses into a feeling of emptiness. This is the moment when loneliness hits. You’ve prepared yourself an elaborate psychological meal, and you realize, belatedly, that it can never sate your real hunger.

Agnes Callard, from “The Problem with Marital Loneliness,” The New Yorker (25 September 2021)

[sa-dnesss]

I don’t know how to do this anymore. I don’t know how to get better. My head is a dark place and it only gets worse, day by day. and I have no idea how to stop the darkness from coming in. I have no idea how to save myself anymore.

[chernoffnightmares]

North Yorkshire | February 2023