3) Empty
The fourth dimension.
Welcome.
We do not live in time. We do not live in society. We do not live in rules. We do not live in this planet. These are all constraints. They are all restrictions that do not adhere to us. No, we live in the spaces between time. We live in the boundaries drawn by the expanding universes. Those are the only boundaries we know. The limit of yesterday, today and tomorrow, do not exist to us. The limit of cities, countries, and this planet, do not exist to us. We experience it all. So welcome to the rest of time, to the infinite cycles of this wonderful dimension, more brightly coloured than the three you’ve been familiar with. In a few moments you will open your eyes, but you will not see them as before. You will see us. We are time.
Like crickets in your mind, more consistent and definitely louder but not audible sound, your brain is vibrating to the frequencies of constant excess. Like a chorus flanger fluctuating through never-ending Shepard tones, your reality seems caught in a state of infinite loops. Your eyelids flicker open and you see their motion being traced, little bubbles of air holding each moment along their trajectory. The white around you focuses into a slightly blurred image, as if wearing glasses with the wrong prescription. You make out the ends of a hospital bed that is marked with its pragmatic hearse-like handlebar to facilitate transport. You begin to feel the bed you’re on with it’s stillness making you nauseous. You start tasting the bitter flavour of stomach acid lining your tongue. You can even smell the staleness of the disinfected floors, but you still can’t hear. Your heart rate is picking up. What the fuck just happened? Where are you? And, why can’t you hear? You move over your left hand, shrugging it off the bed, and displacing a medical cart. A tray falls on the ground and you feel it hit the floor. Still no sound. You focus on your vision; why is the wall formed of twirling off-white spirals? Seriously, they’re forming in the shapes that resemble the 2003 ubisoft logo, with those spiral-eye looking things. So, let’s recap. You’re lying on a hospital bed. No one is there. You don’t remember how you got there. You can’t hear anything. And, you’re seeing some intense visual tricks being played on your eyes. Well, despite this stressful situation, there’s an odd beauty to this moment. An overdose of problems, that had numbed you for years, finally had spilled out of you. As if each one was pulled out of your guts and through the pores in your skin. All the problems are there in front of you. You can see them, touch them, taste them, smell them. There’s too many of them, but they’re out in front now. There’s nothing you can do. You must resign. You must accept that this moment will always be like this, and it’s just as good a moment as any to be in.
In another dimension, maybe 3 or 4 minutes away, a nurse appears having been alerted by the muffled clanging of metal on rubber. They notice your eyes are opened and look at you with a reassured (albeit tired) look. Moving across the bed and bending over to retrieve the tray, they ask, “are you ok?” You couldn’t see the lips move, but you could see the waves oscillating leisurely alongside the maniac photons of white light. You knew they were coming and you felt them reach you: “Are you ok?” You can hear again. You are ok, so you nod. The problems that lay in front of you are ok. They’re not solvable now and they don’t need to be. The nurse proceeds to call the doctor. They come in and tell you how they saved you from severe brain damage induced by heart failure. They’re a hero. They do give you a bit of a telling-off at the end, but not as condescending or reproachful as expected. They say they’ll have to keep you for another 3 hours. You’re not too sure how long that should feel like, so you thank the doctor and lay there content. The doctor leaves. It’s just you and the spirals again. They really are beautiful.
Back outside the hospital, you feel different. The usual sensations have wired themselves back together and you feel like what most would describe as normal. At least you think so, but having been especially very-not-sober the last few weeks you kind of forgot what it felt like. It feels a little strange. It feels as if nothing has changed, that your escapade from reality was but a blip in time. You can start remembering emotions such as guilt and anger. You start remembering the codes you follow and the ones you wanted to. You start remembering that although nothing matters, it doesn’t mean you should make it worse. You still feel a little floaty and hover towards what you make out as a bus-stop. You’re not sure where you’re going again. But you don’t have your phone, and for once you don’t care. You don’t need it. You could use some cash to get somewhere, but you have time. You get on the bus and head to the back. It’s fairly empty and you get a window seat with no neighbour. The bus driver doesn’t look back. They seem fine with it. You’re going to need to collect your thoughts eventually. And you’re going to need to connect with another human over them eventually, too. But you have time. You allow common trees to paint your sky with bright greens and occasional white flurries, while purple hortensia and crimson amaryllis populate the lower realms of the window. The bus comes to a break in the human-formed scenery, entering a wilder patch of tall grass and wild berry bushes swaying in a continuous wave, carrying the bus across like a crowd. They drop you gently onto the open beach. The ocean comes into abrupt sight, wedged between the pounded rocks and the finite atmosphere. You’re in awe of how it just drops off. You look out but you can see no coast, no tower, no mountain. You know the world curves around, but from here it seems like it drops into the infinity of space. You wonder what it would feel like to drop off, to lose all sense of gravity. You imagine a blackhole just beyond the horizon. You imagine getting sucked across time and moving at the same speed as the trapped light and matter that make up everything around you.
The bus stops by a lonesome bench and poll. You slide out of the chair, putting up two fingers to the driver as a thanks for their part in moving you along, and hop off the bus onto the black pavement. The asphalt’s really burning your feet. You look down. Ah, it’s because you’re still wearing the thin hospital slippers. You probably didn’t have any shoes on your way to the hospital anyways. You take a few steps and get to the lighter sand. It’s not quite as hot and rather impossible to walk on with slippers, so you flick them off and leave them neatly by the curb; they could be useful later. The sand feels calming, but a little unstable. You get to the water-smoothed sand, anchoring your feet firmly into an original casing with the most perfect fit. A venturous wave wanders past your heel, its salty lips licking your skin, with the final surviving bubbles depositing a milky-yellow froth that evaporates within seconds from the top of your foot. You look out at the ocean. You begin to think. You see the time moving in the sun. You hear the space on the other side. All that empty space way out there, not so empty as you remember the planets, the stars, the galaxies…also the satellites. You think of the not-so-empty empty space around the horizon, with its rivers, its plants and its animals. You think of all the bacteria filling each corner of your empty space. You wonder if the space feels the same way you do. 99% of the atoms that make up all of it, and you, are empty. The last 1% seems to feel like an irritable itch that can never quite leave, like an out-of-line pen on the desk of an obsessive-compulsive individual. Or maybe the universe is 1% full. Maybe that’s your way back. Perhaps that tiny little percent of stuff is the most beautiful accident of all.
