My Nothingness

My Nothingness…

Karl Klambert. Such a dull name. There was no life in that name. There was no life in him, where he lived, how he spoke or dressed, or so he had been told. That was what his mother had said to him before she’d left.

“I can’t keep raising such a dull child. You have no life, Karl. No energy, no spark.” Karl looked up at his mother; she half-expected a slight glimmer of sadness in her boy’s eyes. Some form of light, or a spark of some emotion. That was all she wanted. But her face fell.
“There’s…nothing,” she whispered, her eyes dimming just a bit, disappointed at this being in front of her. Such a young child, yet drained of life and replaced with a hollow darkness.
Karl looked up at her. “What?”
His voice was pallid, dry. Nothing. Even as a child, there was no form of a child within him. He was just an empty shell. She left.

Nothingness.

It was the dark abyss that plagued his dreams, the emptiness that made up his thoughts, the hole that had swallowed up his heart. What was there to live for? He didn’t understand. When he slept, there was nothing. When he was awake, there was nothing. His world was made up of nothingness.

He stretched and looked outside his window. Nighttime. He called the hours that crawled by during this time the nothing-hours. They deserved that name. It was only when the sun was out, filling everyone with its joy, its happiness, its life that things happened, that people roamed the streets.
He lived in Nichtigkeit. He shouldn’t have been expecting anything else to be outside the window. Nothing happened at nighttime.

He was a plain man of twenty-two and he lived alone. He was never one to believe in love and maybe that was the reason his mother had left. In any case it was the reason as to why he had never had a girlfriend, or even thought of having one. His mind was too preoccupied with trying to figure it out. This mystery.
What was the point to all of this? The world? Life? Himself? He saw no meaning in himself. That was why he had moved to Nichtigkeit. The name had struck him, not in the way one would expect—not in the way it would normally strike a person; it didn’t fill him with the utmost joy of finding a place he could call home. Home was a nonexistent concept. It struck him in a way that made him think that he could belong. Just maybe he could belong to a town, a society, called Nothing.

The town was easily reflected by its name. There wasn’t a surplus of anything. No one who visited could go back and excitedly announce to their awaiting and eager friends, “This place has everything!” Instead, they would utter the phrase one commonly said when they were disappointed about the appearance of a place. “This place has nothing. There’s nothing there to make you want to stay.”
But in this nothingness Karl felt a strange comfort. In the nothingness he felt secure. Living this way since he was young, he would feel out of place, different, if he were to move.

His doorbell rang, piercing the dark silence that often surrounded his plain one-story townhouse. He got up from his bed, not really wondering who would be ringing the doorbell during the nothing-hours. He opened the door and he was met with those eyes. Those light, cheerful eyes that permeated the darkness from outside that was surrounding the woman. Karl flinched back, repulsed, at the sight of his mother. She gave him a smile. A smile full of life. Karl shivered, trying to pull back into his darkness, his nothingness, his lifelessness. His eyes descended into empty space.
“Karl!” She cheered. She stepped in, but Karl made a move that looked like he was pushing her back out, looking at her with his still-hollow eyes. There was not supposed to be any life in this house. Not this house.  
His mother stared at him, and then proceeded to smile again, showing off her life, her happiness at seeing her son again. She accepted his hollow eyes for what they were. She accepted Karl for what he was.
“It was wrong of me to push myself out of your life. You were just a different child.”
Karl stepped back. Different from you, he thought. That’s why you pushed me away. You live in the light, enjoy the light. I can only belong in nothingness.
“Karl…”
Opposites don’t attract in this house. Get out! Get out, you and your light!
His mother stepped closer to him, and Karl shrunk back, even more repulsed and stung by her light and her life. He kept trying. Kept trying to shrink down, shrink back into nothingness. He needed that nothingness.
“I want to accept you, Karl. I want to apologize. I want to give...”
No! Karl thought. She was trying to bring light into a house that was a sanctuary for darkness, for nothingness. Karl would not allow that. He kept trying to push her out. He flinched when he had to touch her, put his hand on her shoulder so he could push her successfully. He closed the door and leaned back on it, breathing hard and letting his darkness pull him back in. He closed his eyes.
His mother banged on the door and he felt little sparks of light hitting his feet from the small crack between the floor and the door. Nothingness retreated from his feet and he begged for it to come back. He knew that this wouldn’t stop unless he let her in and so he put his hand on the doorknob, preparing to open it and let the light in.

But nothingness can’t thrive in the light.

He opened the door and his mother stepped in, full of her life and bursting with bright light. Karl braced himself and did not step back from her. She embraced him.
“I want to accept you and your nothingness,” she said. “I want to forgive you.”

She couldn’t say words like ‘accept’ and ‘forgive’ in the same sentence as ‘nothingness.’ Those were light words, cheerful words. They were separate from nothingness and Karl was regretting his decision not to pull away from her. He was bursting, exploding, when the nothingness retreated from him altogether. It seeped away from the wall of his house.
Let me go! He thought. I want it back! My nothingness…my nothingness…
He tried to pull away from the woman, but she held on tighter to him and, with a cry, Karl exploded with light and was dead in his mother’s arms. Mrs. Klambert gave a warm smile. “I want to give you nothingness…” she finished the sentence and laid her son down on the floor, leaving him and his dark house and his nothingness.