Sometimes I wonder just when I began to lose my mind.

I’ve been looking at the shadows more closely ever since I came into this room. There seems to be more in the shadows here than anywhere else.

I have read that shadows are the absence of light, yet this seems wrong to me. Where no light exists, there are no shadows either. The shadow shows us not a physical shape that exists in reality but instead the place where light has been blocked. It shows us the inverse of that which we can see via visible light, in the form of a space that we cannot see that exists in the shape and semblance of the thing that is blocking the light. An absence and a presence.

And what if all we see are shadows? What does that tell us about the things we cannot see, the things that are somewhere above, blocking the light?

I cannot help but think it as I look around this room, lit only by the insufficient lamp that misses certain spaces or obscure corners that I cannot see, because the light cannot see them, and while the shadows themselves are not real physical entities capable of existing on their own, there could, at the same time, be anything within those areas of non-sight, of nothingness.

In a sense, the memories that move through this house are also shadows, cast by some sort of time-light. Like the shadows made physical in the aftermath of a nuclear bomb, shadows burnt into the ground with the force of the explosion. If light has enough force, then it can make shadows real, permanent.

Is that us? Are we only shadows made permanent? Are we any more real than the echoes that wander this house of shadows—this room of Nothing?

No, not so much nothing as beyond-all-things. But that isn’t quite right either.

Humans have always had trouble understanding nothing. That is, the ness of no-thing, the nothing-ness, the concept of not-anything. And why is this? Because we live our lives in a world of Things: I am a Thing, you are a Thing, this house is a Thing, the grass the clouds the air we breathe—are all Things.

What do we know of ‘no thing’?

The ancient Greeks had no concept of zero. The idea of it, the non-number, made no sense to them. They went about their lives refusing to use zero, even in practical ways, in mathematics and astronomy. It was an abomination. Unthinkable, unimaginable, beyond comprehension. Zero, the evil god perversely existing where it cannot exist.

In Sanskrit the word for zero, shunya, comes from the concepts of void and emptiness. Arabs also used a word for empty, the circle they called sifr. Medieval leaders loathed zero. If God is everything that is, then what is everything that isn’t?

The Evil God Zero again, evil because there is no sense in it, because it breaks rules. We cannot conceive of the void any more than we can conceive of the infinite.

We cannot divide by zero. It is impossible. Try to divide by zero, and what will happen? Insanity. Physics breaks down, the world crumbles, the universe implodes.

Zero-dimensional space has no dimensions. Imagine that. It is a point, a singularity, like the center of a black hole.

Both a point and a void. No-space and all-space of no-thing.

The Zero is here in this room. This is where it comes through—where the nothingness comes from. Comes leaking out.