Nothing
I used to talk to nothing
Not knowing it was nothing.
I was told it was love.
Sacrificial love. Unconditional love.
Life-changing, whole-making love.
But it turns out, it was nothing.
The silence of the nothing broke me.
Upended me. Toppled everything over, onto me.
Crushed under the weight of what was gone.
Devastated that it never existed.
Barely breathing.
Arms clutched to my chest.
Holding the emptiness where beliefs once dwelled.
Beliefs once tightly held
Wrenched from my fingers
When I screamed out desperately into the abyss and in return
Nothing came.
Not the love that was promised.
Nor wholeness.
My brokenness remained.
Unchanged.
No savior to heal the wounds
Un-rescued, abandoned
Utterly alone in random chaos.
The silence of nothing echoes so loudly.
But
Listen closely to the silence.
“You are depraved!” is missing, too.
Worthy-of-eternal-torment-for-being-born no longer the mantra
Berating me over and over
And over.
Not even a murmur declaring me
Evil, sinful, wicked, debased, weak, less-than.
Every condemnation for merely being human is muted.
Beautifully quieted.
The crushing weight of silence almost feels like wings now.
In every empty place
There is now space
To love, to forgive, to change
Myself.
In place of the nothing there is me
And always was.
I could have flown sooner if only I had known.
The thing holding me back
Keeping me down
Damning my soul
was actually . . .
Nothing.
— Angie Jay, Twitter, August 29, 2019
Follow Angie on Twitter and check out her Devoutly Human Facebook page.