…forever.

So they say “don’t worry about it, could be nothing.” But I can’t be so flippant about something like this.

Just gotta hope for the best.

Black, perfect black. Not the fake, almost-black-but-kinda-gray black. Real black. That’s what I feel inside of me all the time. There is no light, just the absence of it. There is no color, no warmth, just dark, cold, solid blackness that grows bit by bit each day. It started as a numbness in my fingers, right at the very tips. After a while it started to tingle, like when your leg falls asleep. The tingling spread through the rest of my hands and up my arms. Then the tingle disappeared. Or maybe it’s still there, but I went from recognizing that dull ache of numbness to feeling nothing at all. Just the absence of it.

Whenever I feel the tingle, I know I’m about to lose more of myself to the dark. But when the nothingness got to my memory, it took over even quicker there than anywhere else. The tingle never came. All I can remember is the black. I know there must have been a time before it. A time of color and warmth. There must have been. Right?

People I vaguely recognize try to talk to me sometimes, or rather they talk at me, because I don’t really hear them. My hearing is on its way out. They give up soon enough because they figure I’m ignoring them, but the truth is that I don’t know how to tell them I don’t understand their attempts. I stopped speaking a long time ago. I don’t remember my last words.

On the days when I manage to do more than count the ringlets in the wooden coffee table, I dig out the same lighter I’ve had in a junk drawer since a one-night-stand left it here two years ago, and I experiment with the flame. I’m slowly turning the mahogany finish to a charred ebony color, and I hold my hand far too close to the flame than is normally safe.

I wish I could feel it, but it won’t be long before the black diminishes my hope, too. Then I won’t wish anymore. I’ll just be.

I’ll just be the black. I’ll just be the nothing.

I guess it could have been the weather. And the lack of good company. Either way, I kinda couldn’t wait to come back. Back to my life of nothingness, of desperation, of waiting and wishing and hoping.

I need a project. Something to take my mind off of everything else, or something to help me deal with it in a productive way. Music, writing, exercise. That’s what I’m going to try and devote the rest of my summer to.

I’m tired of reading. It makes me sad. I don’t know how or why, but it does. It’s supposed to be an escape, a way to make me forget my own life. But instead it’s making me put myself in someone else’s shoes, and often times it blows. Apparently I’ve gotten too good at empathy.

I need to change some things up. Have more fun. Look out for number one.

Guess I’m ready to head back to school, then, cause that’s the only way I can manage these things. This place is poison for my morale.

I’m not much of a praying man, but there is something that has gotten me to bow my head recently. No, it’s not some global crisis or social injustice. Nobody close to me is sick. I’m not facing some serious personal struggle.

But one of my friends has up and disappeared. It has actually been quite a while - three months or so. At first I didn’t think too much of it, because he’s done this before. One time he went MIA for three weeks due to a computer virus. So, naturally, I thought his computer had relapsed. When it got beyond the three week period, I still didn’t freak out too much.

But lately this sense of dread has set over me. Three months is a long time for a virus to cripple a computer, especially when you have the wherewithal to buy a new one rather easily. The more time passes, the more inevitable it seems that I’m going to have to accept that he is never coming back. That something terrible, something unspeakable, must have happened. I’m not quite at that point, but getting close.

I don’t know how to have hope when there is absolutely no word. No idea of what is going on. But I don’t want to give up hope. I can’t.

The worst part is that we had been estranged for a while, and had finally gotten to be good friends again when he disappeared.

I just don’t know what to think. So I pray, and I let it all spill out. I kinda say the same thing every time, over and over again. But it’s all I can do.

I hope it’s enough. I hope he’s okay. Healthy and happy.

And I hope that when he shows up again, he will read this and smile knowing that I’ve been thinking of him this entire time.