The empty bowl

It was a rainy day; A Monday morning. The light in the room was already fading away from the sun hiding behind the clouds representing everybody's feelings about Mondays. The floor was cold, and my feet were making the wooden floor crackled under each movement. Mornings are like emerging from a coma; I usually don't remember where I am, even who I am. In a certain way, morning can become exciting because you get to be who you want to be for few seconds before shifting back to reality. Then comes a flow of thoughts. Most of them are related to work. Sometimes it just feels like I am not in control anymore. My body moves as if it is programmed. Each movement that I am making is under control. My brain oversees my life, and my emotions are muted. I am like a robot, moving toward my workplace, starting my day without an inch of thought concerning the rest of the world. Emotionless or selfish? In some ways, I enjoyed this sensation of being numb. I didn't have the time to think, and it was what was working the best for me.

The days were passing by, time was floating. I was sitting at my desk, next to a giant window. A tree was right next to it, creating a peaceful view. One day, the leaves were changing color. The one after, they were detaching themselves from the tree. Floating in the air before arriving on the floor at the end of their journey. Another day the tree was naked, but the day after was covered in snow. Time passing by. My days were always busy. I started to work early in the morning and was done by the end of the evening. I was always the first one in the office, as the last one to leave, as a stone in the wall. I was, as my colleagues liked to jock about, fixed to my chair. My days were always busy, I never let myself sit around waiting for the time to pass. Meetings after meetings, no time to eat or to take a break.

Today was a rainy day. It never rains here. And something about that was weird, different. One of my meetings got canceled because the rain blocked one of the roads. No one could come to replace this space in my agenda. I was wandering around in my office, trying to think of a solution to fill the empty spot. Having time to think. It was like letting the rain come inside the building, inside the office, and mine particularly. Like the water filling the room quickly, covering my body and my face with no chances of breathing normally. It was like suffocating. I had to feel the space in my agenda to prevent the rain from coming inside. How to make my body work If I was numb to my existence? Without realizing it my legs started to move, and soon enough I left the building. I didn’t know where I was going but I was determined to get occupied while I had time. I sat on a bench. I was looking around, trying to catch glimpses of people's conversations. Trying to imagine what everybody was thinking, or what those people's lives were like. That was my favorite game to play with my brother. That is when I realized where I was. In a graveyard. I stood up. I wrapped my arms around my chest and started to walk towards his grave. I felt cold with clothes soaked. I did not realize I was shaking. My body had sensation again like I had control again. Once I arrived in front of it, I sat.

It was just a stone but one that changed my life. My brother passed away last summer from an illness. It was sudden. It was unfair. I never took the habit to visit his grave. I was always busy with work, or just too busy avoiding it. To pretend it wasn't there was like to pretend it wasn't the reality. The truth is that my brother died at the age of 18, leaving me completely lost in a world I couldn’t even begging to understand.

For a second it felt like the world was stopping. Time was not a thing; it was in this moment just a delusional concept. And I felt it. With the wave of emotions, from my toes towards my face, my body was submerged. I felt dizzy, I felt too warm, and then too cold, I felt so uncomfortable. That is when I realized that I was avoiding that moment because I couldn't feel the pain, I was too weak to confront. But by ignoring it, I let my body destroy itself, and create a wound in me, a hole. An infinite spot of emptiness.

My schedule was busy, without any breaks, to avoid empty moments in my day. As I kept getting busy to avoid the emptiness in myself. The void was sucking everything.

Sometimes thinking was too difficult. Thinking of words, sentences to say, to explain the process of each thought, was torture itself.

I walked back to my office because it was too cold. I was shaking violently. On the way back, I could only think of the things I wanted to tell my brother. To let him know how my life was, a year later. I started formatting thoughts of things to say. The first thing that came to my mind was to tell him about my work. He always joked about people centering their life around work as if life was just about working. He used to say that life was a journey in which we needed to live fully, discovering the joy and the pain the world has to offer. Because suffering is part of life and that is what makes us alive and human. If not, we are just not living and experiencing. Restraining ourselves from loving, hating, delousing, creating, destroying and the list goes on. I felt ashamed because I became the type of person he loved to criticize. I had nothing else to tell him. It was like my life became this empty shell, a fierce one to appear strong and organized, but without nothing inside, like an empty bowl. I was an empty bowl. My work became my way to fill the empty jar, not knowing it was only a way to hide from the world but mostly from myself. It was realizing that filling the space in my agenda is more about filling the emptiness in me, like an open wound inside my chest I am trying to fill by avoiding any type of thoughts and emotions.

I sat back on my chair and looked at the time. I still had an hour before my next meeting. I closed the door and the blind, and for the first time in a long time, I allowed myself to cry. Not loudly, not too little. My face was drowning. I opened my computer and opened word, I started writing a sentence. I am an empty bowl.

But soon enough I filled the empty page.

And later I filled the empty spot in my agenda.

And maybe, shortly, I will fill the emptiness inside myself.

The end.