Dreadful Emptiness

I find the chore of having to describe myself, to myself, very laborious. I’m concerned I have been, or always will, get it wrong. Some nights I go to bed with angsty, pseudo-suicidal thoughts, the result of some melodramatic mental tantrum. But then again, some nights I go to bed laughing, having spent too much of the night on my phone, smiling at assorted bullshit. Tonight I go to bed, with that sense of dread. I’ve always had negative feelings and thoughts, just as anyone else does, but to identify what these feelings are and to slap a title onto them, proves difficult. After some convoluted pondering, I figured that often I feel a sense of dread. A dread to start tomorrow, a dread to have to trudge through school, a dread to service my very few and very simple responsibilities, so on and so forth. What reason have I got, to feel that sense of dread? Under the guise of arrogance and ignorance I freely judge others for their dramatics, yet I hypocritically go to bed with the same feelings. I’m just as bad as every other over-the-top, sack of teenage angst and edge and whatever the Hell else. We are all undeserving of these feelings. In the grand scheme of things, I’ve never felt pain, I’ve never suffered. I’ve experienced a lovely little slice on the grand spectrum of human emotion. So I figured that to put my slice into real perspective, I’ve got to hit the top and fall to the bottom. This is impossible and unrealistic. At least, the knowledge that I, truly am, comfortable in my cushy slice of emotion, allowed to feel exhilarating, depressive lows, and dopamine milking highs, gives me the narcissistic sense that everybody else is unaware of this. They really aren’t, everybody’s seen someone else's Hell, the internet broadcasts videos of women and children slaughtered in the face of conflict, people speak about their experiences having survived the worst degree of burns in a house fire, they talk about having to say goodbye to their ill children, wasting away on their deathbed; having seen that, I will never throw around the word ‘agony’ or ‘grief’ to describe my life. These things are foreign to me. Anyways, this is all available, all this horror, and ultimately it all works to show me, day after day, that I’m exactly what I am. I’m the naive teen, amongst many others, going to bed with an unwarranted, undeserved feeling of dread. Tonight, I feel an especially undeserved, irritating, groping, invasive sense of dread. 

Today is another morning in which I don’t see anyone but the dog before I shower. This isn’t unusual. My parents have left for work already, my brother is still asleep in his room, or at least I suppose this is the case. We never know these things, we just make our inferences; they work, most of the time. What if the sun were to give up, and decide not to rise today. Our inference, our assumption, our estimation, would be wrong. We’d all be fucked. How dare the sun defy us like that, all our rules and our time and our astrophysics and, whatever else is related to the sun. How dare it. I shower, I return to my room, I dress myself, I check my phone, I waste my minimal time until I have to walk to school. The cars are still in the driveway, funnily enough. My parents must be… Elsewhere. Regardless, I’ve got to walk. There are no cars in the parking lot, except one, that’s been sitting there for months. This is a big sign that today isn't a school day. How could I have been so stupid as not to realize that it’s testing week, or that it’s a pupil-free day? The gates are locked, too. Don’t mistake me, this is a pleasant surprise, I’m just frustrated that I’ve had to reach school to learn this. I knock on my brother’s door, no response, as per usual. I knock again, this is the point at which I’d hear a groan, or some mumbling, or a confused ‘what?’ from the other side; I don’t hear anything. I open the door slowly, and he’s not there. I check the rest of the house, the dog follows along, trailing me as I check my parent’s bedroom, the back bathroom, the backyard, the garage, the lounge room. Seems I’m home alone. The cars are still in the driveway. There’s not been any leaving of notes, or at least I haven’t checked in the right places. No missed phone calls. No text messages. So I reach out, and no one answers. I go to voicemail.

“Good morning, mum, have you gone somewhere with James and dad? And if so, thank you for letting me know. Bye.”

I don’t receive a call back, not in ten minutes, not in half an hour, not in an hour, not in two hours. The dog has been strolling around my legs, as I sit at my computer and waste my time. I feel suspicious of something, I’m not sure what yet. I message my friends, they do not respond. And finally, I decided to take the dog out. I inflate the chewed-up basketball he likes to chase around the field, the basketball that slowly hisses out air if you put your ear close enough to hear. I change into some clothes that I don’t mind becoming grass-stained. There are no cars on the road. The roundabout that I cross, with a collective ten lanes converging to spin around this circle, is empty. Not a car passes me by. Not a car is heard somewhere in the distance. I’m growing increasingly suspicious of something. My dog hasn’t a care in the world, he’s just tugging me along to the field. The field is empty, which isn’t uncommon. Everything is empty, and I hate absolutes. Have you ever found a conspiracy that slowly begins to reveal its coherency to you? One that you resist submitting to, in the name of your empiricism, or skepticism, or the powerful resistance one feels when facing a belief that that’s enticing, but just not… Real. I surrender to the fact that everything is empty. Nobody is here. I climb up the overgrown retaining wall, the sloped wall that separates a freeway from the field that my dog and I are enjoying, to varying degrees. I step out onto the road. Every traffic light I see in the distance is red. That’s how everything feels right now, halted. Absolutely nobody is here. All I need is a sound, or a glimpse of something or someone, a plane overhead, the sound of someone’s lawnmower… Alongside dread is an impending sense of doom. I’ve never thought about defining ‘doom’. What is doom? Have I ever, truly felt doom? I told myself I would never use the word ‘agony’ to describe my life. It’d be almost unjust. Am I right to feel doom?