Isolation Diaries: The God of Empty Spaces
Aka The Diaries of a Boy in Quarantine
April 4th: Spent the day watching the Office. It reminded me of watching it with her while she cried in my arms over our breakup. She’s always in my thoughts. Too lazy to go work out and there’s no-one to make me. Calling my parents is becoming harder and harder. I can’t stand to push my face into the rictus grin they need me to have. I need to be strong for them.
What is a god? Historically the concepts of gods and monsters have been used to explain that which is an intrinsic part of the world, yet is unexplainable. Simply look at the first gods: sun gods all of them, rulers of the most fundamental ingredient of life on Earth. Or the Greek triumvirate: Zeus, Poseidon, Hades. The three chief deities of this great religion represented the three things that were most influential and impossible to grasp for the seafaring ancient Greeks – the immense powers of storm, sea and death itself. So it follows that a god is the embodiment of an idea so pure that it transcends humanity .
April 7th: Played Divinity all day. I do digital chores for hours on end, but my real plants are dying. I don’t have the strength to water them. It would be admitting that I’m staying here. I can’t stop thinking of that fucking call. How empty I became when I saw the name on the screen. How I didn’t shed a tear while she broke down on the other end. Her sobs keep me awake till the sun starts rising. The darkness is too full of memories to sleep in.
What strikes me as fascinating about the Greek pantheon of gods is that they are ultimately people. They are lustful and stupid and selfish and ultimately they behave in a way unbefitting all-powerful immortals. That is what leads me to wonder – can anyone become a God? I mean if a god is simply the pure physical embodiment of a metaphysical idea, then all it takes to become a god is to shrug away the restraints of physicality by embracing that which is invisible, yet much more fundamental than what we can tangibly experience, until the separation between man and idea is inexistent. I wonder how hard it could be?
April 11th: Played Divinity all day again. I’m getting tired of even this, but I can’t think of anything else to do so I keep going. The plants on the windowsill are clearly wilting. Most of them I feel bad for, but seeing hers shed its crippled brown leaves fills me with a sweet anger. I need to start working out again.
What is interesting about the monotheistic portrayal of God is that if we interpret it through the lens of man and idea becoming one – the medium between physical and metaphysical – then the Christian god becomes something less than human. In order for one to embody the idea of a God who is the progenitor and destroyer of all, then one would have to embody the idea of everything in and of itself? How does one go about doing that? Well, maybe the Buddhist way. What if you were to dissolve your ego to nothingness, become one with the whole? Then you would be able to glimpse everything if nothing else. Thus the only way to embody everything is to become nothing. Therefore, God does not exist!
April 16th: Went for a run today. Barely lasted a kilometre and a half. Feels good to be moving around again even though the shame of my weakness hurts a lot. It’s funny to me how she always bothered me about being so weak, saying I should work out and I only started now that she can’t reap the rewards. The thought of becoming immensely desirable and throwing it in her face fills me with a perverse pleasure. I’ll run 2 kilometres tomorrow.
I honestly don’t particularly care whether any God/gods exist at all since the afterlife is a problem for tomorrow, once my own sun has set for good. What does interest me is becoming a god. And it seems that whoever chooses to become God himself, the beginning and end, has to lose himself entirely. Being nothing to become everything means that God didn’t create the universe. He is it. He possesses no ego, no separation between what is outside of him and what is inside, no desire to create or destroy, no ability to affect the universe since he has no capacity for action within it. He is as capable of enacting change within himself as a normal person is of selecting a single atom in their organism to act upon. What God is, is instead a sleeping giant, an organism so vast and expansive that its cells are galaxies, its atoms stars. God is everything. And to be everything it has given up the capacity to be any one thing. To become this God, one would simply have to die, to return to the primordial emptiness of its endless imagination. I am not ready to die yet.
April 17th: Ran again, going to make it a habit. I felt the anger boil over today when I found a note of hers stuck in a book. I rummaged through the mountains of junk on my desk and floor to find all her notes and presents and threw it all away. She broke me. I won’t forgive her.
It is perhaps small minded of me to desire the power of a god, but be unwilling to kill my ego for it, but that is exactly what I want. I am afraid of death, still. I have never been able to give up my ego for good, no matter how often I’ve wanted to. The fear is too great…Now to move on. One does not simply wish to become a god and then it just happens because you chose for it to happen. If that were the case you’d already be a god and your desire would be paradoxical. No, in order to become a god one must actively seek to embody the idea which they wish to reign over. It’s kind of funny. What do I embody? I’ve spent the last month alone, stuck in this big empty place, with only the drifting spectres of other presences to keep me company – a bar wrapper left at a corner that wasn’t there the day before, once stacked brochures ruffled about, faint voices in the night. They make me feel lonelier. But in that month, that month free from all people, from all responsibilities, from everything and everyone, what have I done? Nothing. I’ve reigned over my little kingdom of desolation with a pudgy fist of carelessness. I need to find who I am. I need to become the god I was always meant to be.
April 21st: Finished season 3 of the Office. Feel kind of happy, kind of sad. I cleaned up my desk today for the first time in weeks. I’d forgotten how big it was. I need to clean up the floor next so the bathroom door can open properly.
I’ve spent my life trying to turn my back to the light of icons worshipped by others, these fetishes of happiness, power, legacy. That isn’t to say I haven’t myself been blinded by them and will never be. I too have craved and still do for happiness and power over myself and others and above all to leave my mark upon the world around me so indelibly as to become immortal, even after my physical body has sloughed off from this bone mannequin and back into the primordial ooze. But somewhere, deep inside I felt the nothingness that Sartre describes. I knew I was empty. I knew the most fundamental truth of all. Death is not something that accosts us one day. It is something we carry with us from the womb, that seed of the void that gave rise to us and that will return us to where we belong. That is how I will become a god. I will not let the seed return to the void. I will let it grow within me and obfuscate all the lights of those false idols.
April 22nd: Spent the day in bed, scrolling Reddit. Jacked off out of boredom. I’ve been thinking about her again, about those sobs. It’s so hard to get them out of my head. I wish I could just erase the memories. I don’t want to remember the mistakes I made. I don’t think I have the strength to bear the guilt.
If I wish to embrace the emptiness at my core I will need to throw away all the pretences of sanity and society. All these ghosts of ideas as old as time and as solid as sand. Morality, Love, Purpose, Good and Evil, Happiness…Pain. None of these are real. I will kill them all, until there’s nothing left in the world, but me. I will be the god of the world I create, not of one molded from the ephemeral bricks of glory and honour. I will use the only truth there is to build myself and my world anew – death is coming for us all.
April 25th: Went running again after a week. Stopped halfway through the first kilometre. I feel so weak and tired all the time. Spent the rest of the day watching the Office. Finally finished it early in the morning hours. I cried a long time. Then just lay there looking at nothing, feeling empty. I liked it. Went to sleep before the sun came up for once.
I can feel it starting to take hold. I am slowly draining of everything. The memories of family and friends, of old loves and enemies, of all that I cherished and despised are slipping through my fingers. They’re just people, blind and stumbling in the light of a blazing, endless day. I do not belong with them anymore. I can feel myself slipping away between the dunes towards a distant land of cool shadows, of endless plains uncrowded by sweating, rutting, spiteful bodies. That is my promised land, my kingdom of darkness, where my heart of void can consume everything.
April 27th: It’s my birthday tomorrow. I promised Tish and Les to call them. I never liked birthdays. They feel arbitrary and meaningless, yet the value that everyone sets in them is so paradoxically opposite to how I feel about them that I feel they devalue all other days, simply through their perceived importance. I don’t know how I’ll talk to them. It’s been days since I used my voice last. One of the plants has died, hers. The others will soon follow. I hope Les doesn’t get mad if hers dies. I don’t think I care about many people anymore, but I don’t want to add to her sadness.
I don’t think I’ll ever feel love again. In order to feel love one needs to empathise. I cannot do that anymore. Strangely enough my isolation has caused people to become so simple. They’re mindless automata propelled by an incessant stream of inane desires and fears, all fuelled by that fundamental seed of the void, hungrily latched in their chests. Every time I talk to one I can see the little gears in their mind turn as they feel awkwardness or shame or arousal when they look at me. I can move them like puppets if I desire. But I don’t. I hardly see the point in playing with such sad little toys. And some last shred of humanity in me feels that it would be wrong if I did. I need not sacrifice them to become the God I wish to be. They don’t matter anymore. Tomorrow is my birthday. Tomorrow I am born.
April 28th: The call with Tish and Les was amazing. I had some whiskey for the first time in a month and it tasted awful, but that somehow made it better. My family reached out. I felt happy and then sad when I realised I’d forgotten how that felt. I was human again for a second. She’d called me a month ago. She’d said we’d never speak again. It hurt like hell, even though I told myself it didn’t. I thought she was out of my life for good. She wrote “Happy birthday” in a sad, little way. I could see her condescending, selfish thoughts as she was writing it, disguised by a feeling of remorse and redemption. I wrote back “thanks”. I knew it would shatter her. I enjoyed it. That was my last human act.
I never knew how dark it could truly be before. I never thought I’d miss the burning. I never thought I could be blind here. I finally know who I am and it feels so right. The void inside me, that now spreads to all my corners like a creeper, emerging from that tight black seed, whispered it to me as the last rays of my sun disappeared behind the horizon. I am the endless night, the sand at the bottom of the hourglass, the end. That is all I have ever been – a dead man. I would have screamed once, but now I just sit at the top of the dune and stare at the twilight desert I built for myself. There are no falsehoods here, no shiny lies, no selfish people who can hurt me. I try to smile, but instead I break out in big ugly sobs and feel the last of my humanity trickle out the corners of my eyes, pushed out by that empty space inside that now fills me whole. The tears are swallowed by my endless sands and suddenly are no more. I am no more. I am more. I know who I am. I am the God of Empty Spaces.
