The Hollow Creed

[jolly inlet]

I stood before the abyss,
not in wonder,
but in dread—
and the abyss did not look back.
It simply was.
Silent.
Unmoved.
Mocking in its stillness.

I envied it then.

For what is man but a flickering flame
sputtering against the void?
A child abandoned in a godless church
weeping for a Father who never was—
or worse, who was, and left.

I swallowed the black wine of nihilism
as one drinks poison,
not to die,
but to silence the ache
that there is no why.

No God. No soul. No purpose.
Just atoms. Motion.
Entropy in a suit.

And yet—
I did not leap.

Though the creed of nothingness
offered comfort in its cold arithmetic:
No sin.
No virtue.
No torment but the absurd.
No hope, and therefore—
no disappointment.

In the quiet,
this was almost a balm.

Because, yes—
nihilism is not all despair.
It births a brutal kind of freedom.
If nothing matters,
then chains are illusions.
Then I can spit in the face of kings,
burn every book,
kiss who I love,
die when I choose.

It tastes, at first,
like power.

But I have known that taste too well.

And let me say, with trembling jaw,
with fists bloodied from pounding the walls of my mind:
that freedom without meaning
rots the soul
far more slowly
than prison walls.

For what is a man free for
if not to build, to bind, to believe?

In my nights,
I met men who believed in nothing.
They spoke of truth as opinion,
goodness as weakness,
beauty as accident.

They wore masks and laughed in alleys.
They tore down cathedrals
but never raised a child.

They were strong—
cold steel in their eyes—
but hollow, like graves without names.

And I—
I became one of them.

For years I wandered in the desert
of detached thought,
where all things are dissected,
nothing felt.

I tried to love a woman in this state—
to wrap arms around her with a heart
I had learned to call illusion.
She wept in my arms.
I quoted Camus.

She left.

And why shouldn’t she?

What woman can love a man
who believes her soul is dust
and her tears a trick of chemicals?

I watched the funeral of a child
and thought: “How curious,
how unfortunate—
a coincidence of biology undone.”

And I felt nothing.
Not apathy—no, worse—
a clinical detachment
I had trained myself to prize.

Nihilism makes gods of men
by unmaking meaning.
But man, stripped of all purpose,
does not rise—
he dissolves.

Yes, we may stand on the ruins of Heaven
and shout “I am free!”
But the echo
does not answer.

And so I fell—
into silence, into wine,
into the final prayer of the unbeliever:
“Please let me forget I exist.”

But I could not forget.
And that is what saved me.

For even in the blackest thought,
there was something—
a scream in the bones,
a defiant tremor in the ribcage:
This must mean something.

My suffering itself rebelled
against the void.

Not logically.
But viscerally.
As if the soul—
(yes, I say it now, the soul)—
refused to be a joke
of stardust and synapse.

I began to listen to the ache.
To feel it not as a curse
but a compass.

And I saw that the truth nihilism preaches—
that life is fragile, that all ends—
was not reason to despair,
but to cherish.

Yes!
If all is finite,
then every gesture burns eternal
against the brief canvas of being.

If we die,
let it be with hands held tight,
with songs still on our breath,
with blood spilled for something
greater than the self.

Let it mean.

Nihilism is not wrong in its diagnosis—
the world is often cruel,
absurd,
unfair.

But its cure—
to feel nothing, to be nothing—
is a spiritual suicide
worse than the grave.

No, I say.

To hell with that.

I will believe.
Even if I must claw belief
from beneath the rubble of doubt.
Even if God is silent—
I will shout until I hear Him.
Even if He is gone—
I will live as if He watches.

That, too, is faith.

And in that rebellion—
there is meaning.

Not handed down from heaven,
but carved from suffering,
by trembling, weeping hands.

So come—
build with me.
Not temples to false certainty,
but altars of honest pain,
where we kneel not before dogma,
but love.
Always love.

Because if nothing matters—
then love matters most.

[upper heart]

@upper heart

Just pinging so it stays in my thing for later