Stone fucking cold – an awareness that emanates from within. I’ve always believed the most grievous pain would come from what is held inside, from emotional wounds that take more than what forever is offering to heal; but no, I was wrong – the worst pain of all is being empty – drained, becoming a vacuous core, a dull resonating hollow that allows for nothing, not even the sting of its own frigid harshness.

What then remains?

The echo – that part remains. The thunderous slamming of logical thought, things I know to be true and by virtue of their own truth, to be right – just no longer right here.

The shadow – of what was conscious feeling, a memory… The memory of warmth, reaching out to it, grasping it; confusion at being sliced to ribbons on its brittle fractured edge, its tensile strength less than that of my own – for once I make contact with it, it can be nothing more than what I am; cold, empty, invisible, alone – the reality of full awareness.

The roar – perhaps the worst part of all, but no – the echo is the worst of it. Self-recrimination screaming in my head that this is my mind, my sacred territory, my imminent domain to control – well, my folly so it would seem.  Comical, though I have no laughter to spare it in this moment, the thought that my own strength of will, my conscious pattern of thought exerted under strict control for so long – what I consider to be my euphemistic beating heart – would never grow cold. The mocking echo is utterly relentless.

I am a creature of science, one who ascribes to chaos theory – in chaos there is random order to be found that given enough time becomes specified; thus specified random order within chaos. Some would argue the merit of this statement to be the antithesis of chaos itself, simply order if it is to be qualified as specific; and order is not chaos. But if chaos creates order, and order forms pattern, is it not then a foregone conclusion that the rigid stricture of order will in all occurrences destroy the fluidity of chaos thereby no longer allowing for the existence of the chaos that created the order that formed the pattern that left me stone fucking cold?

Well, that’s a tough one to answer. I’ll opt to believe in chaos, in the randomness of the order and the disorder that it also brings. I’ll choose to feel the nothing that gnaws a pit through my existence as there is something worth feeling the nothing for. What that something is – left undefined.

It’s something that was created by chaos, and is being consumed by the stricture of random structure. It is a string that unifies me with a plane that is a more desired reality, a place where warmth still exists… where an echo is to be feared no more than a comforting howl carried along with the breeze.

– oh, by the way, welcome to my happily never after.