The Weight of Nothing, Something

Darkness, impenetrable intangible, casts its unrelenting shadow over me. Reprieve and relief have become obscure ideals, experiential relics of a past the memory of which slowly dissipates into nothing. People tend to misunderstand nothing. In its own cruel way, nothing is something. When it's your only something, you cling to it as I cling to it. I've long forgotten what it felt like to have something—anything worthy of pride and a sense of achievement. “True hope... is swift." "True hope is swift... and flies with swallow's wings. Kings it makes gods and meaner creatures kings." What is hope?

There is light... somewhere... beyond my corrupted dominion. King Macbethad mac Findláech. A bright and shining beacon of hope. One that sadly eludes me. There was a time, when the light illuminated my pathway, but that seems so long ago now. "To persist... " Sorry, need to clear my throat. "To persist... in doing wrong." Something that many do not appreciate. "Doing wrong... extenuates not the wrong... no, but makes it much more heavy."

Why did...why did I expect anything different? Woe is me many would say. “Life's but..." the borrowed words of a dead man "... a walking shadow, a poor player." When the end comes, of course, that is what will become of me. "That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more."

In my perpetual blankness, I know and have found saddening contentment and acceptance that my time on the stage is no more.

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Thanks for reading!

Author's Notes: The above features quotes from Shakespeare's Richard III, Troilus and Cressida, and Macbeth.

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