Into The Nothingness

He disappeared, nearly naked,

Dressed only in a long white garment.

A white cloth

covered in numbers and geometric shapes.

He slipped into the nothingness,

into some place I will never know.

(If I were to follow him,

the me that can know would have left

and I would be left as naked as he was

unable to understand whatever I was seeing.)

He broke with the language of our world,

and left behind only scattered fragments –

A poetic line

A shopping list

An idea for a story

An argument not fully formed.

He left in a succession of slow breaths

Which carried the old melodies we once sang together,

our voices strong and cracking.

He took with him

A thousand stories we will never hear,

food we will never taste,

so many things I wish I learned,

but I didn't.

His face now appears on maps,

The kind I sometimes look at

but mostly I try to avoid them.

His face is quickly losing its shape

even though the map lines tend to converge.

The story ends

and I cannot contain my wailing.

I am left without numbers,

with only a drone of ongoing pink noise

and a few mechanical glitches

now and then

a kind of broken rhythm,

irregular pulsing.