Nothing

Even as a child I was burdened by my shadow. I knew it meant all-exposing light had found me and I couldn’t avoid existing. The shade shaped by my form was the most indisputable evidence that I wasn’t nothing, though I always wished to be.

I came from nothing and still knew its inexorable touch when my mother bore me. The first cry that escaped my tiny throat was in protest of being torn from the endlessness of nothing, that ocean rife with possibility, now shackled by the certainty of probability.

Nothing was my beginning and, when the last vestiges of my bones gives up their structural integrity to the earth, when the last person who remembers me joins me in the void of the beyond, when the song of life passed down by my blood fades from the body of my last descendant

Nothing will be my end.

Nothing gave me life, I wished to know the power of the poems uttered in its vastness to shackle me to space and time.

Nothing gave me hope, I sought the meaning in bestowing me this gift that could destroy me.

Nothing gave me love, I was desperate to feel the warmth of the first body consumed by its irrational flame.

I lost nothing I wouldn’t have gained had I only had nothing to give.

Even if all I am is nothing, I know now that I am the best manifestation of nothing that could have come into being.

I was nothing, so I was everything.