It had once been a hospital room. Cold. Sterile. White. I was now a room of death. Still cold, still sterile, but black. Everything that entered the room was drained of colour, spirit, and even life. It became nothing.
The woman who lay in the bed existed only as a vessel to feed what had already consumed everything that she ever was or ever could have been. Every thought. Gone. Every memory. Gone. She was drowning in the swirling vortex of nothing that was once her mind. She was in a constant state of trying to grab onto something, anything, as it swirled passed. But even if she could touch it for a split second, it would slip through her fingers and she was grasping nothing.
A man enters the room. He immediately feels the need to sit, but steel himself to stand. To stay is death. He does not touch her. Her touch is death. Her eyes drift reflexively toward his movement. Her nothingness latches onto his everything. For a moment, he thinks he sees the light of recognition in her eyes. Gone. The pale eyes close in what could be interpreted as defeat, but before that emotion can even form, gone.
The man sighs and the nothingness swoops into feed on that breath. He quickly withdraws from the room, leaving a single white rose at his wife’s bedside and removing the empty vase from the day before. It too would be nothing in a matter of moments, but he liked to think that for those few moments, the nothingness would focus on the flower and give his wife a moment’s respite, a chance to breath, a chance to hope. As he watched the flower crumble through the gold-infused glass wall, he sighed again and felt as if the nothingness was consuming his own hope. Deep down he knew the nothingness wasn’t sentient, it couldn’t be cured or distracted. His wife was gone.