The Hollow

You know The Hollow. Maybe you haven’t named it, but you’ve visited. The dark place with doors aplenty, each bright and welcoming. A master of disguise, dressed up as imagination or memory. A space safe from reality’s unyielding demands on your time and energy. A land where dreams are subtly distorted into nightmares, encouraging you to stomp dead with a boot heel that which fuels your hope.

The Hollow can be loud, like the inside of a drum. The argument you’ve replayed countless times beckons, but you stay; this was a retreat, after all. You dare to let hope flicker, like when you were little and thought the movie truly might end differently. Anticipation is a second skin as you wait to hear yourself offer the apology pride once swallowed or for his boiling anger to cool. When nothing changes—when he gets in the car, brimming with rage, speeding toward that godforsaken intersection—you pray, still, for a morsel of peace. 

No! Please? Please, stop! This can’t happen again!

You run, covering ears you’d rather rip off than subject to the screeching horror. The thunderous collision, one million times worse for the certainty you were being shown an alternate reality, rips keening wails from your core. The moment of impact, the violent grating of steel, replays like a broken record.

Rocking on the floor, arms wrapped about yourself, you mentally retreat into the darkest available corner. Your husband arrives and you jump up, ready to find safety in his arms, to be free of the nightmare. Before you reach him, the stunning coworker about whom you've always harbored suspicion manifests, taking your partner's hand. The pair passes through you as though through a wraith, their flirtatious laughter a knife to your bruised eardrums.

Deafening hatred makes you sharp and heavy in this funhouse of horrors, where your footfalls shatter the glass sidewalk. Your own face, nearly unrecognizable but for the bloodshot eyes, slices bare feet one thousand times over as you scream for help. 

Anyone, please? Hello!

Throat raw and bleeding, you finally pray for quiet. Stillness settles around you like quicksand. Endless deserts, infinite barren trees, arctic tundra, all cleverly presented as preferable to true consciousness. Besides, you asked for this, remember? Remember how awful, how loud, it used to be?

Silence becomes four cell walls and still you stay. 

In the end, emptiness is all there is. Even the dark nothing of your mind has been gutted—wasted potential, an intimate familiarity. Reality has become the dream. A bell rings or a punch thuds through a time card, a body sits in a chair, the bell rings again. The nothing between the chimes becomes so complete, you register only one deep, loud bong. 

The Hollow swallows you. You are the void, the echoing darkness.

If you fall in the leafless forest, do you make a sound?

“I’m sorry,” you startle to life. “Were you saying something? Oh, right… How am I? Fine. I’m fine.”