Nothing

Nothing(Morgan Hope) The girl floats on the calm sway of the rippled grey and white water. White fog surrounds her; she has no name, no past, and only a future as great as she can imagine.

She judges, she thinks, she has vices, as people must. Like everyone else in that limited species, she can only imagine people-like figures to occupy her psychotic world. She has no imagination to rival the god or specks of ash that created our real world.

Flashes of color pop from all directions. At first, it is pleasing because there is no sun in this world and, like a frog, you are comforted by the light--attracted to it. But staring at them makes her eyes burn and ache. They are distracting her from the mission ahead and are steadily becoming more and more painful. Eventually, the color feels like a strange take on Chinese water torture, and she longs for a gray world… a gray world was so much simpler.

She lifts her head and gazes around. All she can see through the fog are shadows; they are outlines of people, she realizes, but why aren’t they clear? Don’t they come to this place to become clear and full? She did.
Some of them soon float out of sight immediately, and the girl lets them. She could honestly care less about them anyway.
They were probably lost from the start, she thinks.

Waves begin to rise out of the desert, and the first few crash over her body. The dry cold penetrates straight through her. Wave after wave pushes her farther and farther under the depths of the ripple. She could not breathe; she could not think; she could not scream.

She sees nothing else through layers of dark, but a great figure with wings flying over her: a bird or person maybe, but through huge blankets of fading and intensifying dark, she cannot tell the difference.

The ocean will not stop attacking her, lifting her up and slamming her back down. She loses track of time, lost in that tangled wilderness. The cold has penetrated her so deeply that it is her, and she it. She knew the figure by name but refused to call out for help.

The colors: they suddenly come back; the fog: it clears; the sun: it at last becomes visible; the waves: they stop mid-crash; the girl: she stands up and walks on the water that once had her fighting for her life.
She floats serenely on the ripple once again and, after some time, looks up to the figure still flying in the monochrome sky.

“I would thank you for everything,” she begins. “But I know who was responsible for those waves… and I know who had the power to stop them but didn’t.” She stands up, walks on the once-wild ripple, and touches a toe to the sand forming as she walks. “I hate you too much to admit that you may have helped me.”

She is no hero, but neither are you.

She is not special really. Who would write about her anyway? Another normal person. We can't all be special; no matter what parents say, the majority of us will never be any more than average.

So write something interesting about my life, you say?

I will write the average, I reply. If it’s not good enough, I guess we’ll just have to accept that we can’t all be great.