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I stopped speaking and the black hollowness began pulling me in. Its undulations, first surging and then crashing through me, were shockingly painless—simply a void subsuming my plans and wants and memories. In a moment, the irrevocable pressure would submerge me. Everything I had ever been—ever loved—less than a mote in the depths of its nothing.
I wanted to hold on, to say more. Yet there was no time left to rage into the universe, to affront my creator, to scream at the currents of fate entwining my deepest happiness with my final destruction.
“Why does this sound like a goodbye?”
In his question, a realization that life would not write us the ending we deserved.
“Because, it is.”
In my answer, an excuse to feel the shape of his name on my lips one last time.
“Goodbye, Dean.”
I reached out, hand still dripping my blood, and held on to his shoulder. My fingers digging in tight—desperate to stay. I needed to hear him reply. His weight pressed back, anchoring me. I clung fiercely to that tether as the emptying in my chest spread outwards: down my legs, to my feet, up my throat, along my arms. Dissolution left no ache or numbness, only absence. Until the only part of myself left to feel was my hand. The last of me, only pain and warmth where my palm pressed to his shoulder.
Then there was nothing but the roar of silence.
All is still.
Nowhere and everywhere are one.
Time is unmade.
There is no movement nor thinking, no warmth nor cold, only vast smothering emptiness.
There is no sorrow, no pain, no death.
No one to remember and nothing to regret.
No eyes. No tears to cry.
This quietude is irresistible. Vast and bottomless.
If this were an ocean, a small bottle could stay afloat, stopped up with repurposed cork and melted wax. Whatever it once contained, long ago emptied out, drank up, and consumed. Still, fragile glass could carry a message, ink marks on paper scraps, tucked tightly inside. Time would not hurry to deliver such a missive. Lost words would sink to the sea floor more often than they reached eyes which understood how they mattered. A message cast into such depths would be as uncertain as hopeful.
Everything you have ever done, the good and the bad, you have done for love. You are the most selfless, loving human being I will ever know. I love you.
Nothing and no one exist here, yet these words are me. No fragments of matter remain mine, and yet my feelings are written into the spaces in between. I still am here. I am past the end. I am before our beginning.
But you are not with me. You are nowhere I can feel.
Being nowhere is very much like being everywhere. So I spread out, hoping to connect points impossibly beyond grasp. I weave the same spell as ouroboros, trying to bring beginnings and ends together. I long without thoughts. I reach without arms. I who know the essence of your code, written in a billion elegant molecules and the beautiful soul that they barely contain. And even as this consumes me, it brings me back to you.
I find you all wrong. You are twisted and degraded and screaming out in pain.
You are here, breaking, your atoms beyond the repair of hands and grace. I am here, without hands to hold you, my love the infinity between fundamental particles. And I understand the shape of your every molecule and synapse and vessel and freckle. So I reach to all the torn-apart pieces of you and reform you whole. I follow every wayward, twisted coil of your soul and unknot them all. I unmake each tear and bruise that you have carried around. I empty myself into you.
Until it is done.
And, for a moment, it is now and I feel you, as I felt you then. How your shoulder burns hot against my palm, your soul meeting my grace. How my fingerprints brand your skin, scarring a handprint into flesh. And this, our first moment, converges with my last: the bloody palm-print I smeared against your jacket as I said goodbye.
Then I drift away. An empty bottle tossed back into the sea—its message finally delivered.