The Hole

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There is a Hole right in the middle of my life.

Not a chasm into some terrestrial abyss, but a cloaked, alien thing, floating and formless, with the texture and the temperament of torment. It is suffering made manifest, carved out in anti-form, an impression cookie-cut from negative space. It hides in plain sight, hideous and hungry, some Lovecraftian beast, slithering from its own dimension into the shadow-laden corners of my thoughts.

It sneers at me, ugly but unseen, when the cashier at the supermarket asks about my day.

It chortles at the politeness of my lie.

It whispers discouragement in my ear as I surreptitiously tip the bottle to my lips before my morning coffee is even made, wincing at the bite and the burn, brain begging for relief.

It’s going to take a LOT more than that to make me go away, it hisses, from the recesses of my mind.

It mocks me when I catch a glance of a face in the rear view mirror as I drive, one I do not recognize, haggard and heavy and bone-tired beneath an unkempt mane of thinning hair and wily beard I forgot to even try to tame.

It keeps me up at night, tossing and turning, half-conscious, pleading, trying to make contact with a God who never speaks.

The Hole resides within the yellow caution tape I wrap around the perimeter of my wounds, treading tentatively, feigning being fine. In conversation, I strap on a smile and conjure up a lighthearted tone. They hang loose and unconvincing, the torn flaps of a cheap plastic costume dredged up for a halfhearted Halloween.

The Hole’s tendrils are attached to all the writing I cull and never publish, emailing chunks of forbidden text to myself to bury forever in an archive of old spam. Words that needed to be said but must never be seen.

“There are many things that I believe that I shall never say. But I shall never say the things that I do not believe.”

I have never liked philosophers much, and I have never read that line in Kant. It’s a good one, though. A meaty turn of phrase. As I sink my teeth into it, I taste the familiar acrid tang of the ravenous, unseen fiend. It is the nature of this not-thing, the invisible enemy; it is parasitic, puncturing, protruding through the daily details of our waking dream.

It is a ghost, as small and subtle as an escaping sigh. It is a leviathan, too big to truly see, colossal and inexorable as a singularity, density and darkness pulling, grasping, clutching at anything that comes near. It sucks up everything, especially light and love, and stuffs them into the obliterating gravity of its unrelenting maw.

The Hole crouches in the endless expanse across an empty stretch of bed, sheets crumpled like mountains, a topography of loss. It basks in the ache for an embrace, the lonely faded memory of love’s last kiss.

The Hole is inchoate but not indistinct. It is not a soft thing. Its edges are ephemeral, but somehow hard as diamonds that effortlessly shred.

It is the open secret never said aloud, the pulling of a self-protecting punch, the grief circumscribed behind polite evasion, the unspoken flame of unmet need.

It is the crushing weight of guilt, the hell of self-inflicted ruin. It is the linearity of time, marching always onward, onward, onward, with no way back.

No undo button. No reset. No new start.

It is the infuriating straightjacket of consequence; the downstream debris of choices not made, obligations unmet, actions ill-considered, emotions unchecked. It oozes like a wound, squeezes like a snake, constricts my lungs so tightly that I can barely breathe. It lays down traps, pre-rational fetters pinning back a will that only play-pretends as free.

The Hole lives within the falsity of good days and the ubiquity of bad ones. It bares its teeth between lines of unsolicited advice, handed out like street corner flyers for a strip mall chapel, where grace is cheap and indiscreet. It feeds upon the well-meaning misapprehension of those who do not know the whole story — or rather, the story of the hole.

It pulls the leash, yanks the chain, cracks the whip. It barks orders about what may be and what must never be.

It is the dark matter of the personal universe, unseen but always felt, a lump in life’s throat that refuses to clear and will not be swallowed and can never be numbed.

It eats hope. Excretes despair. Encourages self-deception and denial. It throws its weight around at unexpected times, clattering, careening, smashing, stomping, breaking things at moments where you might otherwise build momentum, just to remind you that it’s there.

You must never forget, it whispers, gutless and guttural. You must never move on.

As if you ever could.

It is the unspoken secret that hollows out, burrows deep, contaminates, infects.

It rears its head under the guise of half-realized fear, and the anticipation of its completion of the task only deepens the sense of dread.

It steals life and light and will. It scoffs at Sisyphean stubbornness.

Push the stone, or don’t, it snarls. Either way, you’re just more grist.

It is the shape and color of a lonely room, sour scents of fecklessness and failure wafting heavy in the flickering blue light of an unwatched television, eyes glazed, staring, beyond a forkful of forgotten food.

It hungers to consume, to bite, to gnaw, to rend the sinew from my weary bones, soul kept like a dimly-dying firefly in a jar.

It is a monster. A horror. An abomination. It is a demon everybody knows yet others rarely see.

It is the pain so deep it anchors you to chaos, entropy, and death, and you dare not speak its name.