Nothing Revolts, part 9

It is at this moment in the story that I have some very grey news. I’m not sure I want to tell it to you, but I suppose I have to, since you have already come with me this far. As is often the case in real life, our climax has fizzled out. It has come to nothing. What has happened is this: Just as our planet’s astronomers were beginning to notice the impending nothingness, and just as Davis and Gwen had begun to get a feeling that they were in for something really big, and just as Francis Coffey and his demon turned onto Davis’s street with souls bent on adventure, Nothingness began to recede, replacing everything it had absorbed. It was not because of ennui that this occurred. It wasn’t because Nothingness was afraid it had left the gas on back home. It was because Nothingness had an epiphany, which was as follows:
“I am absorbing things into myself. I am nothingness. If I am nothingness, where are these things being absorbed into exactly? And who is this ‘I’ that I am referring to? Nothingness isn’t an ‘I’. Uh oh, ha ha. I appear to have pulled an Otis. How funny. How funny. I am something. Aren’t I something? Yes, I am.”

And Nothingness (now something!) paused. It paused for a good long time. And then it started spitting things out, and walking backwards.
I’m sorry about that, dear reader. I know you expected something spectacular. Hell, so did I. But as I said, this is often the way things go. You want to battle dragons and rescue princesses, and sometimes you discover you’re just fifth business. You’re sweeping the floors. And that’s okay, because maybe there’s no such thing as dragons, and if there are, why is battling them the de facto best course? And isn’t the idea of damsels in distress kind of outmoded anyway?

Life can mean whatever you want it to mean. It is in your power to view your world in whatever way you want. It is in your power to try and be the best version of you that you can muster. Notice I say ‘try and be the best version’, not ‘be the best version’. This is because all you can do is try. You’ll probably never be that perfect person. But I would say that perfect person probably isn’t perfect anyway. They’re too rigid. Too scripted. I would say that you, whatever you are, are probably way cooler than that perfect person that you would like to be. We get glimmers of the big picture from time to time. Sometimes strange and beautiful things fall into our back yards. Treasure these moments, but know that they’re not the whole story. Not by a long shot.

So, Davis won’t be battling the Nothingness. So what? Battles are boring. There are always battles in stories. I’d just as well have things the way they ended up. Besides, how many kids do you know that have talking space rocks?

THE END.