The norm

Annulment and dissolution, despair and absence.

I, who was nothing, who had never existed, and who would remain nothing because the ground of my burial would never be plowed or sown, saw. I saw how the restless shapes of those around me floated, wandering aimlessly in eternal darkness. There was neither above nor below; no direction spoke to me of a place to reach. Those mimes resembled me, although deep down, I knew they were nothing more than reflections of a meaningless form. Like actors in a pantomime without an audience, they moved like damned shadows, forced to wander in a place without walls, without sky or ground. But that darkness was not just a backdrop: it was a pulsating, material, primordial presence, a thick, amniotic liquid of ash. Every movement we made seemed to reflect forgotten paths, an instinct repeated without memory. No one spoke. No one looked at me, nor did I turn to them. We were dispersed and alone, bound only by the sharing of an absence.

Yet, I tried to move my fingers, pushing them forward in the absurd and futile attempt to find something, to dig, perhaps to unearth a buried answer in that darkness. I felt my hands stretching, as if animated by a will I did not recognize, trying to grasp, to bring some hint to light. Some of the mimes moved in identical, almost obsessive gestures, as if trapped in an endless cycle; others touched their bodies, as if seeking confirmation of their existence.

I too brushed my fingers over myself, trying to grasp my own consistency under my fingertips, as if I could thus prove to myself that I was something more than just a shadow. Suddenly, one of the mimes—perhaps someone I would have called a companion, had there been a language or tongue in that eternal silence—raised his hand and sought, like me, something above him. His hand stretched, almost as if he wanted to rip something from that black aura. But he found nothing. It seemed that the more he moved, the less substance his body had, as if that act, as futile as it was desperate, was consuming what little was left of him. He continued to move with the desperation of one trying to prove to himself that he was capable of an action, even when he knew that the action itself led to nothing. I watched that gesture, and it seemed to me to be a projection of my own soul, teetering between being and non-being.

It was then that the darkness became denser, as if its essence were becoming impenetrable and its nature indissoluble. And from that abyss, from that bottomless nothingness, a sound emerged, a faint, indistinct hiss, like the wind of a forgotten world. Before us, a figure took shape, a woman—or something that wanted to appear as such. She writhed in that human form, deformed, consumed by a dark, corrosive energy. Her bloated, putrid body emitted a sweet yet nauseating odor, and from the open wound in her side, clusters of yellowish grapes protruded, like worms crawling from rotting flesh.

We mimes felt neither fear nor disgust; I sensed that a reaction like that would have been too intense. I merely gazed at her, slowly approaching, without an impulse to flee, without a desire. I, along with the others, observed her, drawn to that shape that was only a parody of life. Our hands moved in mechanical gestures, like in a dissonant dance, without rhythm or melody. I felt my hand brush against her, but it was like touching emptiness; the contact was real and absent, a faded imitation of a desire I had never felt. There was no passion, no pity, only the suspicion of being condemned to a rite that reeked of perdition, a viscous swamp from which we could never escape.

I then understood that above us, far from that infinite darkness, something existed. Not a god, not a presence that offered us salvation or condemnation. No, it was something different, a norm, an immutable, impalpable order that was nonetheless omnipresent. I could not say whether it was benevolent or cruel, but I knew it governed that universe of shadows. It was like a primordial law ruling that nameless void, a faceless spirit that could not be comprehended. I felt that I was destined neither to live nor to die, but merely to exist in a meaningless form, as if I were the reflection of an unformulated thought.

In the absolute silence, we ceased to move. Even my gestures had stopped. There was nothing left to grasp, nothing to imitate. We were neither blind creatures swimming in a pool of water in a deep cave nor shapeless sludge, whose meaning depended only on who might notice it.

Yet, within me, I felt a deep guilt. Not a moral guilt, but an ancestral sin, as if my very existence violated the natural order of that norm. I knew that if that world was devoid of reality, if everything was empty, then even my greatest act would be nothing but fiction, a senseless performance on an invisible stage.

Then the figure of that formless woman moved toward us mimes, and her body swelled like putrid mud expanding. Without haste, she began to phagocytize us. I felt neither pain nor terror; only the perception of a slow dissolution, a gradual abandonment of any semblance of form. I felt my limbs yielding, melting in that slimy, inhuman embrace, as if I were the echo of an idea in an unfathomable space, destined to fade away.

It was not death, no, it was worse than death. It was an annihilation without boundaries, without purpose, without a contrary.

I asked myself: why had I arrived there if I had never departed from somewhere? The answer seemed to dissolve like mist in the wind, leaving no trace. The mimes around me twisted in a desperate ballet, struggling against their fate, yet in every gesture, there was a sense of surrender, an acceptance of the inevitable.

I felt that, even though our existence was marked by a lack of meaning, there was a strange beauty in our helplessness. Like a mournful melody played on an untuned violin, our dance was an expression of what it meant to be part of something, even in that condition of emptiness. Our existence, however insignificant, was a testament to a collective soul that sought to be heard.

And so, as that feminine form swallowed us, we joined together in one final movement, a spiral that enveloped us all, united by absence and lack of form. In that moment, I understood that, even if we were destined to fade away, our essence continued to float within her, an echo of lost life in the transfigured eternal silence.