The Weight of Empty

Following a bout of intense depression, this was my attempt at explaining what it felt like to me - not the sad stereotype, but the feeling of disappearing altogether.

People think it's the pain that gets you, but they're wrong. The quiet is the worst. It's the disappearing act, like a magician on stage, stepping behind a curtain, stuck without a trick to expose. It's standing in the middle of a crowded room and being alone. 

Empty. 

Invisible. 

So heavy, you could sink to the bottom of the deepest, darkest sea, but you're already there; so weightless, you could just float away and no one would be the wiser. 

And you're supposed to reach out, you're supposed to scream and kick and flail your arms and hold onto the earth but you're like a paperweight, not strong enough to hold down the bulk of these things that are killing you. Or like a stone, forced into being by years of pressure and heat, made to be so small that no one even sees you, even notices when they kick you into the water, your splash barely big enough to make a sound, but your mass heavy enough to drop straight down.

And how can you possibly be both at once? It defies existence, but maybe you were never meant to exist at all. So still you sink, and you float, and you don't reach out because what are your fingertips supposed to grasp when you're drifting through the clouds and falling through the depths at the same time? 

And that's the weight of nothing, of empty. It's the largest mountain and the smallest river, impossible to climb and more cavernous than the naked eye can see. So you just keep getting further, out of the atmosphere, to the core of the earth, until you're the smallest dot on the horizon, and then they blink, and you're gone.