When I think about nothing, I think about everything. I think about trying to think about nothing, and how impossible it is. I think about what anything was before it was anything. Is nothing the darkness of the sky when soft grey clouds block the moon and the stars? Is it the dark blankness when you sleepily open your eyes in the middle of the night? Is it something you can't see but still feel in a moment of particular emptiness? My idea of nothing is dark and vague but it's still something. Nothing can't be imagined, the moment you try to picture nothing you've already created something in your mind, a void or a blank space or even the thinking of nothing is something, still a thing with boundaries and definitions, and I wonder if true nothingness is even accessible to human consciousness since our minds automatically fill empty spaces with thoughts and sensations and memories and dreams, like light bleeding under a closed door or the way dust dances in a sunbeam you didn’t notice until you stopped moving for a moment, until you were still, and even then you aren’t really still, your blood is still rushing and your lungs still rise and fall and your eyes keep catching corners of the room and turning them into faces or symbols or fears you thought you had forgotten, and maybe that’s what nothing really is, the unreachable, the silence that exists just before a sound but is never truly heard, the glowing blue that whispers just before night falls to black, a breath held eternally, and when I try to feel it, when I really try to hold that absence, my body betrays me by conjuring up weight and pressure and a tension in my shoulder blade I forgot I had, as if my body is terrified of nothingness so acutely and so does everything it can to interrupt it, to decorate it, to make it bearable by naming it, to make it shine, because everything must shine, right? Even with just a hum or a heartbeat or a flicker behind the eyelids that says you’re still here, still breathing, still rushing full of blood, and I think maybe that’s the truth of it, that nothing is the space where everything begins screaming to be known, where everything wishes to be born, where everything begs to be felt again, and again, and again, because to be felt is to be real, to be felt is to exist, and maybe nothingness is just existence waiting, trembling on the edges of itself, vibrating so softly you almost mistake it for stillness, but it’s still not still, it’s never still, it’s the waiting room of all things, the breath before the breath, the pause before the thought, the iridescent sheen of a bubble swirling right before it bursts, and I wonder if this is why we toil to sit quietly for long, why we tap our fingers and bite our lips and fill silences with nervous laughter or small talk or music or prayer, because we are afraid that if we let the quiet get too large it might swallow us whole, it might show us how close we are to the edge of something we can’t quite place, something that has no shape but still holds us in its tender hands. I think about how even when I close my eyes and try to empty out every thought, there’s still the whisper of my own wanting, my own desire, the soft ache of my aliveness echoing back at me, proof that I am here, that I am not nothing, not yet, and how comforting it is to feel that I am not nothing, I have never been nothing, and if and when I return to nothing, my awareness will have shifted and I still won't know nothing.