The bench was cold beneath me, that was a nice change. It had been so long since I had felt anything. It wasn’t enough but it was a start. It was why I was here. My hand scratched at the rusted paint on the armrest, continuing the work of the sea air. The wind carried the occasional mist to me, reassuring me the sea I could hear and smell and taste and feel but couldn’t see was still there. Death joined me.
Death didn’t take a form, but I knew it was there.The feeling of nothing is unique, I’d felt it for nine years, so I recognised it immediately when it sat beside me. It doesn’t feel good and it doesn’t feel bad, you don’t really feel it at all, you just feel that something should be there. It starts small, and then it grows, although really it’s everything else shrinking. It can be hard at first. You miss the parts you lose, until you lose the part of you that can miss things.
“You’re early.”
I didn’t respond. The light behind me showed the steps to my left, and the steep slope of what I knew was green down to what I knew was grey, followed by what I knew was yellow-brown, though the orange of the street lamp was distorting the world. The beach continued on to the left, to the few lights I knew as my home town and the harbour and the sounds of the sails when the wind shifted.
“It’s ok that you’re early. It doesn’t bother me. Nothing bothers me.”
The bottom half of my face smiled. “Nothing bothers me, too. That’s why I'm early.”
“Nothing gets everyone in the end.”
I thought for a moment. “You’re wrong. Nothing got me years ago.”
“So what is special about tonight?”
I smiled again, “Nothing.”
We sat in silence for a while after that. I appreciated the company. There was something familiar about the feeling of nothingness beside me, like meeting an old friend. One you feel comfortable sitting quietly with.
“Death. It’s just a side effect, really.”
“I know, it always is,” it said.
More silence.
“I used to come here as a kid. It was disgusting. There was trash everywhere, empty beer cans and wine bottles. Swarms of flies everywhere you went. And the dog shit in the summer was unbearable. Now there’s nothing, really. I walk here a couple times a week, it’s been cleaned up, but there are never any people. I only talk about coming here as a kid since I don’t have any more recent memories.”
It was Death’s turn to remain silent. There was nothing more to say.
And I stood and walked down the steps to my left, over what I knew was grey, over what I knew was yellow-brown, into the sea that I could smell and taste and hear and feel but still couldn’t see, and I swam for a while and the wind changed direction and I could hear the sails in the harbour, and as the wave took me under and I felt the cold of the water on my skin until it numbed me and felt how it burnt my lungs until it didn’t I understood that nothing gets everyone in the end.
