8/14/2019 Through the Pages of a Requiem

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Jeffery Ross lay awake in his chilling bed. His covers where hap-hazardly strewn across hiscalves, and his right arm lay slump over the bedside. Had one not heard his thick, inconsistent,struggled breathing, one would assume he was stuck in a state of comatosity, as if his soul hadmerely left his body on a whim, and left only this empty shell, husked off like that of a hermit crab.His eyes darted back and forth, but made only the slightest of movements. They studied everypattern within their field of vision, from the acoustic padding on the ceiling, to the way the drapesshivered with the dampening night air. His mouth lay open, saliva flowing out and down the side,pooling below his neck. His ears were the busiest of all his inhabitants, taking in every soundwithin his perceptional view, and playing them back as a high-pitched screech, nearly deafeninghimself.

Further down his body, his chest and abdomen where pulsating, contracting andexpanding, irregular to his heart beat. And his heart! Oh how his heart worked, attempting to keepbeat along with his pacemaker, trying in near-vanity to support every helter-skelter action his bodyexerted, whether voluntary or not. On his left, his hand dug its fingers deep into the mattress, withnot so much tension so as to rip the flesh from bone, but certainly enough to turn his knuckles ashade of ivory rarely seen on this side of the color spectrum.

His lower body was much like uptown at night: Seemingly peaceful, yet still full of lifewithin every dark crevice. His knees locked in place, and his feet bounced back and forth, tickinglike metronomes, as if trying to aid the heart in its futile efforts to support a body no longer attached to any world of our own.

The only part of Jeffery Ross's body that seemed even remotely lax was his right arm, which aspreviously stated, lay limp and lifeless over the bed side, almost touching the floor. A small trickleof blood ran down his arm from where the needle had punctured his vein, and his hand still heldthe needle, the vial nearly full. There was peace within this appendage, though that did not nearlymake up for the rest of the systems confusing, bewildered behavior.

One would think the Mind would step in at some point, and try to grasp hold of thesituation, only there was a certain absence on his part. Though, there was no empty hull atop theneck. For certain there was a brain within, but nothing to manage it. Jeffery Ross's mind waswithin a different plane completely, and as it gazed out across the empty nothingness that wasthis metaverse, it tried to grasp an understanding of the situation.

But this was a realm without thought. Without reason. Without matter. This realm was no place for a mind. This realm was no place for anything, in the most literal sense possible. This realm was

Nothing. But even that was a dubious claim.

How could the Mind be sure what Nothing really was? How could it be sure if Nothing wasanything? How could it...And this was the affliction of Nothing, to drain all Logic from the Mind. Itwas a void that was not a void. A "thing" that wasn't a "thing".

It was. It wasn't.