Evie laughed to herself. It was just acting. Then again, she often did have trouble determining where she ended and someone else began. She wasn’t sure if this was a side-effect to acting, or to existing. Or if there was even a difference between the two.
When she searched herself, what she found was: she didn’t really care where she ended and someone else began, or vice-versa. She relished her loss of awareness when slipping into other personas. And whatever persona adopted, there wasn’t any genuine attachment, because she would be operating from a place of void. One was the same as the other as the other. None of them were her. And she wasn’t her. The void signed off on everything. In invisible ink.
With nesting doll instincts she dreamed she was someone else, and that someone dreamed they were someone else, and that someone didn’t dream at all. That someone was the last straw, the dreamless one, the tenant of emptiness.
You never come up against void. That never happens. You come up against your resistance to void, that’s what stops you, freezes you in your tracks. Void is something you pass right through. No doors, no barriers, no parameters, no anything. You glide right through on pixelated skates, and then realize, in ways that are both terrifying and liberating, the endlessness to emptiness. A form of self-mutiny occurs, and everyone you thought you were is thrown overboard and there are no life preservers. That is when you feel the ghost that you always were and always had been, that is when you become haunted by the tenuous proximity to your own ghost-life.
Evie knew from a relatively young age that others could sense the void in her, and they swarmed like frenzied moths to its glaring white absence. People were magnetically drawn to Evie’s void, because it was easy to project into. There was nothing there. They could simultaneously confront and evade, look into and turn away from their own voids, by allowing themselves to pool inside of Evie’s secret two-way mirror.

(Image by Heather Ross)