From Down Here Deep

“Oh yes, my outsides are very small; but my insides are very, very big.” ~Willow, age 3

I miss you so deep I could scream and no one would hear me.

At my deepest depth, I am standing on the stage of a great opera house in pitch darkness, not another breathing being to be found in the wings, the boxes, the pit, the balconies. Just me, and the cavernous possibility of the room. At my center, I am a living space of resonance. Of acoustics. Of super-massive silence. And in this inner space, my inner silence is not the Void. It is no vacuum, where sound collapses and disappears into itself.

No.

The space in the center of me is a gigantic stone drum. A water tower, windowless and unfilled. An ancient tin cathedral built by a race of long-extinct, sightless giants on a planet with no sun a million million years from now. When I go here, Down Here Deep, on the rare occasions that I can slip fully away from the Surface, I can sense the dimensions of the space around me even though the borders are far too vast to see, taste, or touch. I can tell from the way the sound of myself is echoed back to me in the immensity that I am contained. The vibrations that originate in this space never leave it, but echo in perpetuity, becoming such totality that the endless cacophony reads like stillness.

This container holds purposelessness and wonder in perfect suspension. Emptiness and creativity balance on every molecule in its gravid air. This organ of mine, this soul—this stupefying, unknowable vastness that is the single most recognizable part of me—is where the everything of me is held in ageless equivalence. It’s where the longing and the grief and the ecstasy and the elation don’t feel like they do on the Surface. Down Here Deep, they don’t feel at all. They just are: perfectly interspersed through the wordless expanse. It would be easy to mistake all this hanging. yawning stasis for nothingness. But it’s not. It’s everythingness. And it’s here. Down Here Deep. Always.

I could scream here and no one would hear me. But some part of everyone would have always known the sound.