12:49 a.m.

12:49 a.m.

And so I sit here, in the dark, under the madcraft of night, besieged by the demons of insomnia, and I think. I think about where the man I used to know has gone. The man that I knew myself to be. I sit here in the silence, save for the humming of my laptop, and I wonder where I have been all this time. He fell into a bottomless hole, into some lightless abyss, down, down into the furthest reaches of his heart and mind. I have been lost. And I do not recognise the man that sits here now, in this unlit room, in front of this screen. Yes, to a certain extent we are all shells of something else, something that is us-but-not-us. But what happens when we become too much of these other things, too hollow, too much the shell and not the filled whole? If we do not notice that we are now but shells, then we become something else entirely—someone else entirely. And, if we are lucky enough to recognise that we are not ourselves any longer, we must choose what to do about it. Either we accept that we have lost ourselves, that we are drowned in our own turmoil of mis-identity, for good; or we reach out into the unknowable void, fling out our arms into the ocean of loss, and wrench ourselves back from the brink, out of the damned abyss! No, the man here now with me does not belong, he is not for this time, for this place, for this life. No, he is for the void, for the darkness, for the nothingness. And I damn him back whence he came! Because I remember. I remember who I was—who I am—and who I will always be. The shell is cracked. The emptiness refilled. The man who was is once more the man who is. For I am not of the lightless abyss. I am of the here and now. I am that which is substance and that which is whole. I, am I.

M.M.