Infinite

T-Wolf (He/Him/His, She/Her/Hers)

Editorial Team Member

The mind can be imagined in many ways.

For some, it is quite literally just the brain, talking, shouting, whispering to itself. A full house of rooms with different sets of memories. Infinite filing cabinets, ideas and information stored away in folders all across the cabinets.

My head, as I imagine it, is a void. Black with ink, rippling through the ground, seemingly empty in its vast expanse- except for the stories and characters I have written, wandering around. It hides so many secrets I cannot begin to describe, coming up with new characters just to toss within, watching it grow before my eyes with every word I write. Ever since I started calling myself a writer, it has existed, flowing with ideas both shared, and not. I have made stories for a place of stories, known only to myself in all its depth, allowing it to naturally organize itself in its lore.

It has become a mental refuge for me, amongst the characters I have both given happy endings and tragedies to. I can imagine myself talking to them, imagine them knowing me, imagine how deeply their fears and desires run concurrently with my own- and it never fails to be a source of amazement. I can truly entertain and learn for hours, with nothing but my own mind and body, sustaining myself off how intricate my own story and life run through what I write. Never does the void slip from my mind, because it is my mind, forever infinite, forever expanding. Therein lies pockets of myself to be discovered, and pockets to create.

I cannot imagine a day where the void stops, and my ideas fail, words drying up and flaking away. A void does not stop, all consuming, all creating. How small we feel, in the face of mortality- yet so often we fail to recognize the infinite that is housed in each of us. Death is the only thing that truly kills creation, kills thought, kills the void- and yet even there it does not succeed, as long as we leave enough shared, enough made, to carry on to those still alive. Death is the only thing that keeps us from being infinite. Our minds, if just one were to be preserved and kept immortal, would never stop running. Yet just over the course of one lifetime, we run into hundreds, all running around voids of their own right.

I still rest in delight, to know that some ideas, stories, thoughts, will be inevitably taken with me to the grave no matter what. The true extent of my void is kept safe by death, all the what-ifs laid to rest only by the ink running out. I write to outlive my own mortality, leaving stories forever in the grasp of the public, leaving myself etched into every one- yet I cannot truly mind the end, either. Creation is never complete, never done, never finished. There always remains more.

But I will leave that more for another generation, to let into their voids.