The beauty about trying to define nothing is that nothing itself encompasses a number of things. If everything is nothing and nothing is everything, then how does one begin to describe what nothing is? And that being said, nothing can mean lots of things to lots of people, even accounting for overlaps in definition. I suppose you could also describe nothing in its most material sense, nothing being a lack of any odd thing. That way nothing is a physical concept rather than an emotional one.
That being said, if I had to describe nothing, I’d go with the latter.
Nothing is what you feel when you stand at the edge of a cliff, looking into the calm waters below, poised to dive. It is what you feel the second you jump off the edge and the second you hit the water, yet what you feel in between those moments is nothing short of everything.
Nothing is the silence at the bottom of the swimming pool, the blue-tiled water clouding your eyes till they turn red. It is trying to stay still at the bottom but having to fight the currents that keep pushing you to the top.
Nothing is waking up in the middle of the night for just a brief moment before falling asleep again. And for the moment that your eyes are open, the dark nothings of the room are calm enough to lull you back to sleep.
Nothing is the emptiness of standing in the room you lived in for ten years, frozen amidst brown boxes labelled ‘Shoes’, ‘Clothes’ and ‘Books: Handle with care’. It is the fullness of standing in your new house, the place you will call home from now on…or at least until you go off to college.
Nothing is the moment of respite you get after a bout of laughter so intense that your sides ache. In the good way. The best way. There, in that moment before lose control and start laughing again, all that elation reaches a zenith of nothing before beginning all over again.
Nothing is the response you have at the end of a long day. "How are you? Are you okay?" "I’m fine. It’s nothing." It might not actually matters if you’re really fine or not, and whether what’s bothering you is actually nothing or not, but what does matter is that you resolve to start again the next day with a new sense of nothing. No matter how you choose to define it.
Because nothing is more than the absence of anything. It is how I have experienced everything.
