Kenotita

Flash fiction for the 'Submit Your Demon' challenge from Aurelian Ashmore

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I am Kenotita, demon of the void that occupies what should have been.

I am the anxiety that blinds you to the glorious colours of the sunrise.

I am that still, small voice whispering to you in the silence of a sleepless night.

When you stay late to get ahead, when you pick TV over your partner’s human touch, I lick my lips.

Every time you choose gold over love,

A scroll over a sunset,

Your to-dos over holding your child one moment longer,

You are pouring sweet nectar into my open mouth.

But you cannot slake my insatiable thirst.

I want more of you.

I want all of you,

                                and you'll give it to me.

You know what would nourish you,

But instead you choose to lacerate your soul day after day,

Gouging tracts with the rusty nails of dissatisfaction.

They fester, oozing jealousy and want.

Fear not. I will lick your wounds with my poisoned, forked tongue.

Hush, now—you won't feel any pain.

You won't feel anything at all—

And isn't that so much worse than feeling something?

I will savour those delicious drops of blank space,

Watching them spread out, discolouring your world

Like an oil slick on the surface of your soul.

Come to me.

Bow to me.

Sacrifice your weird and your wild on my altar,

Driving your knife into all that made you unique.

Set fire to your otherness, the parts of you that howl and growl, and let them burn to ash.

Spill the blood of the unfettered, untamed creature you could have been on this unhallowed ground

                                     and let me drink you up.

Raise your voice to me in anguish and speak the words of the prayer your society taught you:

I am not enough.

I will never be enough.

I don't have enough.

I don't do enough.

More, more, more.

Give me more, more, more.

Can you feel it?

The hopelessness, the futility,

Your creeping mortality, waiting to descend and erase all that you are.

Ask yourself, what is the point?

What is all this for?

Listen to the silence as the cosmos ignores your questions

Because you are nothing, nobody—inconsequential, insignificant.

We’re almost there.

All you have to do now is try to fill that gaping emptiness,

Not with wholesome things that would offer you sustenance,

But with judgement and comparison,

With self-hatred and discontent.

Spread your poison about the others, but don't forget to first feed it to yourself.

Remember you are the one who isn’t good enough.

Invest all your energy into being fitter, harder, richer, thinner, smarter, more like them.

Push yourself to go higher, faster, further—so far that you can't even remember why you’re doing this.

We’re so close now.

Have you forgotten the whispers of the forest, the sound of the sea,

The last time you walked barefoot on the grass

Or buried your fingers in the hot sand?

Have you forgotten you’re a child of the universe, that you’re stardust,

That you have an animal body and an eternal soul?

That’s good. That’s so good.

Just a little further.

Don’t stop now.

Keep going.

Don’t look back, don’t close your eyes, don’t look inside.

Throw yourself into the rat race that never ends—not until your final breath whispers out from between the lips of your death-mask. 

You'll search for meaning then. 

In your very last moments, you’ll look for the wild thing you always knew you were, deep down, and find her gone—obliterated by a lifetime of shoulds and yeses—and that's when you'll realise:

                                              I had you the whole time.

This is a response to the prompt below from Aurelian Ashmore of Cicada Cult. Thanks to Saint-Lazare for bringing it to my attention via their own awesome entry.

Submit your demon

In Greek, κενότητα (kenotita) means emptiness.