Finding Me

A short nonsensical story going through struggles that I constantly am enveloped by.

Finding Me

By Noah Shaffer

The never ending abyss echos in my heart of hearts. I taste the air, it yearns for me. I feel the
rain on my face, it flows through me. I see the blood on me, it sticks to me. These senses are
flooding through whom I am. These THINGS I feel, I hate them. I feel, yet I don't. I see, yet I
don't. I taste, yet I don't. These things fill me with a void. A voiceless shell of a person. I
constantly seek me. I constantly want me. Yet when I look, I see who I was, not who I am. I
SCREAM. I SCREAM at the top of my lungs. I cry. I CRY, but I do not feel sad. I do not feel right.
Who is me? Who am I?
I find myself walking. Down a path. A path I chose. That is where this story starts. A path. I feel
as though I gave up and let the river flow, and I was just a passenger drifting along. I feel like it
wasn’t me who decided this. I didn’t choose to be an artist. I just am. I am an artist to tell people
about the nothing I feel. About the pain I go through. I walk through the full halls, I see classes
and classes. I sit. I feel the cold chair. The class blurs by. What was it I learned? What did they
say? Over and over I look at the assignments. I scorch the lessons into me, but I wasn’t
listening. I wasn’t hearing. I wasn’t seeing or feeling. It wasn’t me. I do the work. I see the work.
I feel my fingers on the keyboard as I type an essay. I feel the pencil in my hand as I draw my
muses. Muses? What are my muses? My lack of muses? The art of nothing. The calling of
nothing. The feeling of… nothing. Nothing is all I use. I absorb others. I absorb knowledge. I am
that knowledge. That flow of life.
I see who I am supposed to be. A little boy at the end of a long hallway, he is crying. He is crying
because he doesn’t know who he is. He is on his knees. I reach out, no, my heart reaches out,
but it can’t walk, all it can do is sink, and it does. It plummets, plummets down the slope of
eternity. I feel it falling, the weight of it. That sinking feeling trying to express who I am, but it is
just reaching for the boy used to be. The emotion is not mine, it is his, and they are young. I
cry, I scream, I yearn for someone to love me, but who can love a boy, who can love a shell,
who can love this person who isn’t me.
The voices in my head, no the writing in my head, the script that runs through my mind. It plays
over and over. Wake up, look in the mirror, “You are ugly. You are fat. You are not right,” it says
with a silver tongue. I accept what it says, it is right. It feels right. Why wouldn't it be right when
it's all I hear. It plagues my mind endlessly, why wouldn’t it be right? That script guides me. I
yearn to feel something that isn’t this script, but its toxicity is the only comfort I have. It is there
when no one else is, it hides in its dark shadow. Me, it is what I am, or at least what makes me. I
do something wrong, and it is there to comfort me with its horrible words. It is there to sting me
with its sharpened spear.
It sometimes leaves me alone, and when I am alone, I am nothing. I feel nothing. I see nothing. I
taste nothing. It takes those, no, it took those, a long time ago, along with the boy at the end of
the hall. I can be happy, I think. I feel bursts of energy, and I can’t help but grin when things are
good. When I am hit with love, the lights turn on, and I run something more than a script. That
darkness hides in its shadow, but when that light is off, it crawls out. It lashes its teeth into me. I
bleed. I sink down and nothing can save me. I take the knife, I use it how I always have. It
doesn't have to be sharp, it actually doesn’t need to be a knife. Sometimes it's my hand,
sometimes it's not even me, I set myself up for pain and failure to try and give into the darkness
so it can be with me once more, and it can creep out of its shadow and embrace itself into me.
So it can take over writing the script again, and I can look in the mirror and see the worst in
myself.
I am not the writer of my story. It is. I am just the body it hosts. I am the vessel. I am its muse. Its
dark muse. The muse it paints its horrible, disgusting, malicious pictures of. Without it, I am
empty. With it, I am bleeding. This paraless void in my mind takes its cold hands and wraps
them around my head. It tilts and looks and jerks and squeezes until blood trickles down my
neck to my shoulders down to the floor.
I am a prisoner who chooses to be here, because it is all I know, and all I know is the view of
that boy down the hallway, that boy who is me.