Emptiness

An Absence of Many Things

Of an empty room — An absence of many things A presence of none

No one has ever been able to count the number of thigs that are absent from an empty room.

Supposedly.

Never the one to shy away from a challenge, the other day I rose to that particular one and set out to count the number of things absent from my very-empty-indeed back bedroom (in an earlier incarnation it was a guest bedroom, but since I no longer entertain, as it were, and since I no longer receive visitors or guests, well, no need for a guest bedroom — now just an empty, hardwood-floor, four light-gray walls and a slightly darker ceiling: an overcast night sky).

Yes, I set out, firmly resolved to count them all, all those missing things, but I gave up at one hundred forty-six, this while the line of absent things clamoring to be included grew and grew, almost exponentially, with each breath — clear writing on wall.

Deep breath.

And another.

Instead, I decided to count the number of things absent from my empty heart — a lighter task, I figured, since not too many things would fit in a heart my size, and if it would not even fit, I should not have to count it as absent, right?

Right?

But as I began to count, astonishingly, my tiny heart grew and grew to fit more and larger absent things (and to spite me, I think; at least a little), so again, the line of absentees grew unmanageably long and soon I was again tempted to just shelve the project, but since I had already come up short once today, I decided to stick with it. Grit.

Count.

So far, discovered as absent from my empty, though still expanding, heart:

Bell-bottom jeans, fruit flies, Mom’s cinnamon rolls, trigonometry, integral calculus, differential calculus, pure mathematics, G. H. Hardy, Ramanujan, ice cream, iceberg, frosting, cake, chocolate, chocolate cake, forgiveness, trust, tenacity, broken arms, five-kronor coins (about one dollar), Beatles haircuts, DAT (Digital Audio Tapes), DAT recorders, the Atkins Diet, the Grapefruit Diet, the Liquid Diet, the Fruit Diet, strawberries, whipped cream, trout, hobnail boots, Traffic (the band), maps, compasses, Isaac Asimov, Dune (written by Frank Herbert), names-day presents (they don’t celebrate names days in America, nor in England — but they are huge in Russia and they count as, roughly, half a birthday in Sweden), the Swedish Flag, the Danish Flag, European football, ice hockey, tundra, reindeer, wolverines, wolves, polar bears (called ice bears in Sweden), starvation, global warming, generosity, compassion, glee, conquistadors, Inca, massacre, Rwanda, genocide, holocaust, Flat-Earth Society, Chairman Mao, Stalin, Hitler, mass-murderers, mooring lines, tide, spindrift, foam, seagulls, ospreys, hunter, hunted, cows, ruminating, grass, skylarks, sunflowers, wind velocity, quantum entanglement, whispers, small angels (as in a clear glass globe), stupid plots, plot holes, pot holes, clichés, alliteration, ground frost, the draft, Arlo Guthrie, killing, corpses, Khmer Rouge, Touch (the band), West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band (another 60s band), mice, cats, rodents, ermines, frogs, plop, haiku, short stories, short shorts, prose poems, odes, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, French, flunking French, German, arcane grammar, Finnish, impossible language, alien visitors, flying saucers, flying disks, worm holes, Atlantis, Elvis, kissing cousins, King Creole, the Jordanaires, My Boy Lollipop, the Locomotion, Little Eva, Grand Funk Railroad, Petula Clark, Downtown, Uptown, Summer in the City, the Loving Spoonful, kerosene heaters, gas stoves, scrambled eggs, smoked ham, salt shrimps, stealing, thieving, pilfering, misappropriating, snatching, pinching, nicking, filching, lifting, snaffling, liberating, kleptomania, boy scouts, troll mothers, regular mothers, fingers in tills, relieve of, innocence personified, whistling, blue eyes, who? me?, snow storm, freezing to death, Frosty the snowman, his pal Rudolph, fake tears, the Kinks, the Zombies, She’s Not There, more fake tears, ouzo, pernod, licorice, chewy sweets, ferry boats, stormy water, time, the Doors, The End, Light My Fire, Just One Look, the Hollies, New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Radio Luxembourg, crystal radio, bad reception, mid-winter sky, northern lights, the milky way (The Winter Street in Swedish), four hundred billion galaxies…

…and counting…

© Wolfstuff