Nothing There

If you are an avid visitor, you may have read the page “A Beginning or The End” posted earlier in May, regarding an upcoming trip to Indiana, Pennsylvania, to hang out with a friend for the weekend and to possibly battle some very old demons. 

Well I went to Indiana and hung out with my friend Bill and we talked a lot and walked around a lot and it was really a great weekend.  But as you know, I went there for my own reasons.  I felt the need to go back there but didn’t know why. I felt the need to find out what was there for me that I thought I needed to find or face or deal with. I felt like there must be ghosts there that I needed to exorcise.

You know what I found in Indiana?  Nothing.

Even as I approached town on Thursday night, I was sort of saying “Here I am” and waiting for what I thought would be the inevitable flood of memories or feelings or regrets or lost opportunities or whatever.

Nope.  What I got back was “And you are…?” 

There’s nothing there for me. It was all in my imagination.  I have memories of the place, sure. Some good, some bad, but there’s nothing there that has anything to do with me anymore.  It’s a nice place to visit, but it’s just a place. 

This bothered me for a little while because I felt stupid reading so much into it.  Until a friend of mine pointed this out to me:

Nothing is a mighty surprising thing to find when you expect to find something.  And yeah, sometimes isolating the essential nothing can unjam you like nothing else.

So as I wandered through the corridors of a mostly empty Waller Hall (the theatre building), I heard my own footsteps falling on the now carpeted hallways, and heard the echoes of the heavy steel doors I opened and closed, and I wondered if anyone else was in the building wondering who might be making those noises. 

And it occurred to me that sometimes the ghosts we hear are us.

~ by bronwynjoye on May 27, 2009.