By Finn Sapp PZ ’26

Nowhere

Nowhere is the labyrinth that fell in your lap. The illuminations you’ve worshipped vanish under the mossy wall, leaving you stranded in the colorless sand. Nowhere is under each world’s perversions: the things once cherished now floating in the itchy wind. You are crushed by dull days that have become transparently complacent and abnormally awkward. Purgatory dusts your eyes and they cannot see without regret shooting you in the head. Your blinks become earthquakes that rattle you against the maze’s spikes. The closing of your diluted eyes tightens the maze. You are annihilated by the world and its malicious mediocrity. The life that has slipped from your shattered grasp lies beyond the maze.  

But the maze is long and zealous in its desire to prevent escape. Formulating optics adjust to a discomforting plane. The perilous journey through the maze is epic with chance and sticky stance. The bubbly goo hinders your stride, holding you in place. With nowhere to go, your quest becomes a prolonged nightmare. Thus, it is the Odyssey retold. You are Odysseus in his protracted voyage from Troy. He became lost and found himself in Nowhere, with no way home. His maze of Aegean isles, seductive monsters, and deathly despair took away his soul. The abandonment of his soul obscured life from the Asphodel Meadows. He seeped through his own mind and found he was being strangled by this life and the next.  

Nowhere is nowhere because your soul, like Odysseus, relinquishes its duty. The pits of Nowhere are cold and black. Nowhere is the frozen sting of ice on your dry skin. It is the darkest dark; darker than the depths of Tartarus. The maze is the pit, swallowing your life and leaving your husk on the edge of emptiness. It is the place where not even Hades hears your cries.  

Nowhere is no hope. No hope is no one. No one is alone. Alone is Nowhere. Alone without hope is the recipe for the Devil’s introduction. He seduces your effete disillusionment to drag you out of the life you knew. He leashes you with an infernal collar that keeps you trapped in the enigma. Inordinate mystery becomes commonplace, replacing the light with delusion. Illusory mirrors spring up to replace your shadow. Now, the silhouette that has accompanied your stride is a contorted reflection of you inside out. Your putrid and squalid interior warps into a demented figure. You are this form when loneliness becomes your vast despair. Hopelessness eats your breaths, falsifying your mind’s occupation, and feeding you forgotten devotion. It deserts your heart in favor of self-preservation. In the claustrophobic void, the heart becomes numb. It cannot feel that tender kiss of euphoria, issued by the people that were once close by. Your figure is a dimensional demon, drowning in a river of your repugnant tears.  

Your sentience withers without the warmth of connection. The flow of life and its imperfect rewards have become unrequited echoes spit out into the void. The consciousness that constitutes your existence steps on you. Your tight grip on yourself unravels. The unfurling yarn that upholsters your every molecule exposes you to further isolation. The cyclical bondage of hope gone astray keeps you in a place with no one but you.  

Nowhere is the insular realm where no one shares your burdens. The load is yours to carry in eternal oblivion. Nowhere continues its protuberance of each slice of your hemorrhaging spirit. Dreadfulness is your food. Brewing hate that ferments in poisoned blood is the woeful water you drink. Your innate goodness is now but scarce shards rotting in the dirt. The distorted doppelgänger by your side is your nightmare, eating your mind, and savoring each bite. The unknown repression guilts you into the obscure purview of self-inflicted consequences. This becomes the conduit for your own insanity. Nowhere is a realm born out of a bad card in the deck. That card imposes upon you that you are the perpetrator of your own demise. The hand you were dealt by fate has become universal law to you. Your shackled obedience drags you around in the ground’s rigid heat. And all the while, as some omnipotent apparition plays with your shell, you still endure being trampled underfoot by your own misdeeds. The heavier the burdens, the weaker you get as they tumble upon you. Alone, under the array of your inadvertent sins that have bestowed upon you, imprisonment awaits. The hot underbelly of your mistakes is the middle of Nowhere, beyond understanding and out of touch from reality.  

Nowhere is loss. Loss comes from Everything, who guards the secrets of a starlit dimension free of the tribulations on this side. But life yanks the love out of your hands. You are a pauper under life’s tyrannical regime. You are a cloth puppet in the middle of the chess game, where he gingerly toils with your strings. He encircles you with the memories of genial purity and the untainted contentment you once possessed. Again and again, he tears your heart out, inducing a vengeful pain that burns in perpetual agony.  

Life loves loss. He bathes in the sight of your excruciating confusion as to why you’re now here. It is this pleasure you ponder. You introspect about the common thread. And it comes to you: the higher you go, the further you drop. The clarity is clearer than a crisp morning blanketed by an invigorating sunrise. He is with you in the pit. His satisfaction lies in the discreet malice he inflicts. You are in this hole as sport. Ever since you first stumbled into the pit, you have never fully recovered. You climb each time up the jagged walls to return to the paradise above. You crawl closer and closer believing you will surmount the vicious pit. You see light as you approach your mission’s terminus. Light begins to kiss your shadowed face. In this new perspective, your vision expands to regain the strength that has been stripped from you. Unity and love and connection innocently greet you again, welcoming you back to the land of promise. At the very last step, he appears from the deep and hurls you back in. Your supersonic plummet back into the abyss steals each thing you hold dear yet again. Then, like the tale of Sisyphus, the climb begins once more.  

Nowhere is all these places. It is the place without the color that ignites your sense of humanity. It is where the blankness hints at nothing, where every direction is the wrong way. Insurmountable grief, loss, hopelessness, and regret are the culprits in your indefinite stay in Nowhere. Here, under the boiling pressure of the past, the emptiness consumes your spirit. The light in your eyes wanes after each moment of isolated torment. This punishment you endure in solitude. Far from the caress of the salty, ocean breeze. Far from the smiling sun on a summer’s eve. Far from the courageous moon, standing watch over each uncertain night. This is Nowhere.  

Everything 

You are under a streetlight in the City of a Thousand Lights. This is a place full of cheer and romance. The city’s bountiful fraternity welcomes you into its embrace. The city is a place free from the suffering in the bordering wasteland. But you are here. You are in the city of magnificence and splendor equal to the gardens of Elysium. It is the physical manifestation of superlatives that bring charmed vigor into each light of the city. Exuberance comes free in the city. Exorbitant freedom blesses the streets in which you prance like a steed in a golden field. It is so unequivocally stunning; it appears to be a dream. But your eyes do not deceive you. You are not misconstruing your potent imagination for a tangible place. This is the marvelous work of a world ascending. Rhapsody becomes an elixir that you drink like wine. The City of a Thousand Lights is so tremendously wonderful, it is everything you could hope to have beneath your sensory umbrella.  

You are not alone in the City of a Thousand Lights. Everything is every single thing that has blessed your dreams, and this place breeds the delights that come to your wandering mind. You walk down the street with all the dreams you’ve ever had. There are no night terrors that once polluted your sweaty nights. Just the rich wonders that have given you a reason to chase after your dreams. They are all here giving you the ability to fly. The dreams lift you up to Everything you’ve sought to become. You stretch your arms to the light. This light is your omniscient form condensed into the highest light you’ve ever clutched, adjacent to God in His mighty throne. One layer below the gates of paradise, out of the domain of your dreams, you stretch out to meet God. You reach out to Him like Adam, taking his place and becoming the new son of the Lord. Nothing can touch you except the jubilation of life being the most it could ever be.  

After your sojourn in the divine sky, the aura of this place sets you back in the streets of the city. You find yourself drenched in a collage of light that reveals the answers to your undying questions. The exceptional clarity becomes a strange hug of relief. This strangeness is born from unfamiliar comfort, the kind that quells your surging fear. From this fear comes a cushion of peace that empties your body of the searing tension. Absolute freedom and sublime ecstasy shock you with a jolt of life’s secret identity. The city unveils the secrets that have been sheltered from your shielded eyes. The enigmatic riddles and cryptic ciphers are unlocked. The extensiveness that resides in infinity is yours to command. Thus, the omniscience you’ve obtained transcends into complete omnipotence.  

You’ve completed a meteoric rise to the throne of the city. On the streets below the dreams in the streetlights bow to you. The elusive pictures that have escaped your memory now answer to your word. Benevolent emperor of the city is the exaltation you wear. The puzzle fragments have finally coalesced into a unified citadel. The glorious sanctum of all joyous things atop the crystalline city is Everything. Everything is the swift union of every wondrous element tied to your existence.  

The world lives in the City of a Thousand Lights and you are the world. As king of the city, the world subjects itself to your watch. The physical plane from which you’ve graduated is a toy ball under your command. An all-seeing vantage point in your praised throne gives you the sight to perceive what it means to be alive. Ancient questions find their mates in the answers arriving from across the universe. Every infinitesimal planet, raging star, and spectacular crescendo of every end falls inside the borders of your empire. The universe, inside of the City of a Thousand Lights, looks to you; the being with Everything in their hands.  

Everyone 

Everyone is a tale of four entities that have seduced, entranced, mystified, poisoned, and abandoned you. The tumultuous times with the goddesses were the most congruent you have been with yourself your entire life. The exquisite creatures that have found your heart are Everyone that have completed and disintegrated your soul. You have felt the scorch of Hades, Lucifer’s infernal whip, and Medusa’s fatal gaze. But you have also witnessed the mosaic of love’s boundless gifts, heaven’s perfect hug, and the whisper of time’s lost answers. Every one of the beatific women has been the owner of your heart and the knife that sliced that very heart in half. Everyone is the antithesis that has pronounced your existence as Nowhere and Everything.  

The first warmth that entered your innocent life was an isle dwelling nymph. You gazed from afar, knowing her from only your mind’s fabrication of her touch. But one day, you grew weary of simply observing the mysterious being. Your imagination went stale and convinced you to swim to her visceral island. Approaching the unfamiliar place, you were greeted by sunshine’s tender touch and the sand’s soothing melodies. And in the supple sand you gazed upon the foreign beauty. She arose from her beach to pierce your unsuspecting curiosity. The penetrating look latched onto your mind, spiraling you unto Everything. The blissful mania jolted your dormant lust for life into a stampeding horse in the sights of his mare. Everything was experienced for the first time, and the rampant rush of kaleidoscope rapture awoke your soul.  

You slowly approached the nymph, whose radiant glow pulled you into her spectrum of colorful serenity. Your arrival sparked tender unity to enter your blossoming dance. Ambient excitement for your new love washed the darkness off the island. You and the nymph symbiotically connected. The island became Everything.   

The island was your haven, where the sea was the mirror reflecting the genesis of your love. The nymph was yours and you were hers. The fantasy that lived in your dreams sprung to life. Every day, you and the nymph strolled the cool forest, swam in the serenading ocean, and held one another in the luscious grass. The sweetness you stumbled upon was everywhere around you, splashing you with secrets of a higher existence. The further you went with the nymph, the tighter you two were wound. Up and up you flew and lighter and lighter the air grew. Every ounce of tension dissipated until every drop was expelled from your body. You soared swiftly into paradise. Enchantment and ecstatic charm blessed your love. The nymph was a piece of Elysium injected into your soul. You re-aligned with your cosmic path that you’d been separated from since birth.  

Your escape from the sour blandness had invigorated the life hibernating within you. The salvation you had sought, the one that had seemed too distant to know, was yours to wear. Your naive first-time walking hand in hand with love’s grace was splendid past the extent of measure. You became a subsequent resident of the island, with just you and your divine partner to bathe in its spoils.  

But like everything you’d seen and been dealt before, the days grew short and nights long. The sweet nectar from your love’s kiss became a foul lick that scarred your face. The richness of the island devolved into a dilapidated ruin, furnished by the black’s unending thirst for revenge. One day after the other, the nymph slowly phantomized. Divinity seeped out of her body, as blood gushes from a wound. She morphed into a translucent hallucination, thus deforming into a ghostly memory. The island was a shadow, haunted by the memory of a pure love gone dead. The insidious depletion of Everything infected the depths of your core. The poison’s slow evil turned you into a ghoul, out for revenge against the divine. Traumatic delusion tainted your mind, warping you into a sickly beast that had been banished from love. Ergo, from the horror of your new form, the island threw you from its shores. The torrential wind gusted you back into the bottom of Nowhere. Love vanished and the essence of what it means to be alive was lost again.  

For years you crawled out of Nowhere, through the fires of Tartarus, and back into the realm of the living. Your new life, as a hermit on the run from Everyone, kept you in an indefinite waking state. Never finding true rest because of your fear of being turned into dust plagued your thoughts. Nothing pleasant came to you. Distraction and compulsion to escape the nightmare was what kept you from drowning in the terror.  

Yet, despite your hesitancy to find a new love, a halo arose from the horizon. In the cold abyss of the night, an angel sent from heaven came to greet you. The angel’s snowy wings, fluffy with substance and compassion, wrapped you into her embrace. The muck that grew in your mind began to disappear, inviting clarity to ward off the entrenched despair. The two of you were entwined without delay, sparking each other’s desire for living. The angel’s energetic constitution was different from the nymph’s. The impulsive lust and raging pursuit to become someone’s heart was an unmatched drive in her. The impetus for your rapid blending of forgotten souls was a dose of Everything.  

The seductive squeeze was an intoxicating blend of pleasure and pain. The marriage of the opposite sensations was exotic. This duplicitous divinity overthrew your heart. You lost control of your very function, which was now under the jurisdiction of an angel from another world. There was no feeling that had matched this toxic elation. The awkward delight that coursed through you couldn’t be thwarted. It was so great but consumed every crevice of your sanity and consciousness. You came to the epiphany that you were under the influence of a parasite with the libation of glorious incapacitation. The angelic leach ate you from the inside. She had become a rodent inside of your heart and a serpent in your head. Each thought was of her and her treacherous conniving to expel you from Everything. The trespasser that had soared down from heaven with a halo of pure starlight, was the disease that had become your reality. There was a lovely burn and enchanting possession of your soul. You ran from the night that began to wash over you once again, but the angel was steadfast in her cunning conquering of you.  

The fortnights bled into months, months into years, and years that felt like eons of torture. Your perpetual inebriation from the angel’s poison was jubilation that ate you slowly. Expulsion of the angel from your body came at great expense. It took sages with spells and temples with curing potions to rid you of the demonic angel. The excruciating exorcism of the dark angel altered your complexion. The scar from the nymph gained a mate with a wound that scorched your ability to trust for ages.  

Purgatory was the dimension that the angel ejected you into. In the void you found no way to claw your way out. You found yourself at the end of Nowhere, the furthest place from the light you’d ever been; a place outside of time’s borders. Desolate isolation crept over you and there was no one to catch your tears. This was to be your new home. Your throat became a desert from being without water. Your parched eyes, unable to see, fell into a blurry haze blinding you into submission. But into the abyss of Nowhere, a spec of hope found you.  

The being that you glimpsed found herself stuck in the same blankness as you. Your despondent lassitude from the continuous pounding of love and its shroud of superficial salvation beat you into this wasteland. Yet, in your lowest state of devolution and shrunken spirits another broken entity found its way into your sights. The strange beauty came to you in the form of a woman. Her humanity was obscured behind artificiality, but the mask was too pure to resist. The aura of the woman was akin to the angel from hell that had placed you here. This woman was riddled by an opaque figure with no discernable outline. In your new home of broken answers, this penumbra came to you with the answers you’ve been longing to grasp.  

As you began to inquire about the inharmonious person before you, the joy that had preliminarily swept you swiftly vanished like smoke into the night. She removed her poorly stitched mask and revealed her suppressed identity. The woman was a succubus who flew down from Lucifer’s kingdom to torment you. A twisted distortion of a being she was, one that was visible in her complexion. The holistic nature of most didn’t encompass her. She was a jigsaw with the wrong pieces glued together. She wore a facade of idyllic, breathtaking, and pristine beauty. But underneath was a dichotomous demon that lied to your eyes. In oblivion, just you and the succubus shared the emptiness together.  

Her elusive magic conjured images that overtook your mind. The witchcraft transported you into the wonderland of your earlier loves. She impersonated these false visions to pick up where the angel left off. Her only purpose was to coil your existence, trapping it in a box, to then replace it with her book of false realities. In your mind, the pages read to you in her acidic tongue. They projected visions that began to melt each layer making up your consciousness. The phantasmagoria in front of you was a spectacle of light and smoke, substanceless in its vivid illusion. The deception became a reality you could not escape. But, one day, her enjoyment in puppeteering your nullified mind ran dry. She no longer cared for her little toy. The fog subsided from your half-melted sanity, leaving you with another scar. This scar on your internal composition was never to close: cut down to the point of permanent debilitation. The succubus had left you in the mire of Nowhere’s black vault.  

This last flirtation with love not only broke your need to be completed by another but threw you away. You wished for your breath to disappear. The macabre distaste of love’s vile slap spun you through each layer of Dante’s Inferno. The acidic confluence of Nowhere and its sadistic laugh stuck in your marrow. No longer was Everyone your life’s pursuit, but rather the opposite: elude the madness at all costs.  

Nowhere became your home. You grew accustomed to the persistent decay of your soul and the essence of who you are. The numb rumble of the daily drift swiftly sucked you dryer and dryer. Your barren heart that was a hole in the void with its shallow pump being a reminder of what you’d lost. The days went bitter. The cyclicality cracked your teeth each time you tried to speak. The ramifications of opening yourself to the hideousness of love cemented you to the ground. Your desperate pleas to escape were but unheard whispers in the bowels of oblivion. But one escaped from the shadows. One found its way from Nowhere’s inescapable nothing.  

You looked up to see a star levitating, warming the frozen realm that held you captive. The beaming silhouette above came to you. Aphrodite, the most spectacularly gorgeous of all beings, sifted through the air to sway you like a fragile fawn. Her tender smile brought the world to you. She flew you to her enchanted forest with the woodland creatures of the most fabulous fairy tales. The ancient goddess was Everything and Everyone that you’d begged for in your cries. Aphrodite was a piece of Olympus and the absoluteness of the gods. Rejuvenating was her hug. Reviving was her voice. Reinvigorating was the gaze that refertilized your heart. You could once again metabolize love; it was no longer the rotten sludge that congealed your soul. Aphrodite’s ambrosial red hair tossed in the fragrant wind, softly entrancing you to her side. Your pleas from the forsaken deep came to greet you once more.  

Everyone was once again yours. Love and the tangible taste of another’s affection drew you away from the darkness. The forests of Everything became the oasis, flavorful with the sprinkling light from Aphrodite’s lively stare. Aphrodite, the very epitome of love, was what you worshiped. Your salient savior from Nowhere uncuffed each shadow from your body, purifying you with Olympian grace. She took you back to the City of a Thousand Lights where you could dance with your dreams. Lightness took you and gave you flight. You embraced Aphrodite with an eternal hug, jumping into her soul hoping she would jump into yours.  

But as you blindly leapt out of yourself, you dropped right through her. There was no return on her part. It was one-sided trust, a lop-sided affair of blankness inside of her. You morphed through her heart and crashed into the jagged fire underneath the forest. From the bottom of your hole, Aphrodite stood atop, glaring at you in distasteful disdain. She felt no pity, nor remorse; only a pretentious repulsion of your pathetic attempt to coalesce with her heart. It wasn’t the divinity deemed the most exquisite of all living things, it was a crude rendition of the goddess. Love had once again played with your heart, lying to your eyes with illusory, evil sorcery. The fourth and final scar trumped the others as you could no longer see. Your eyes vanished with the sorceress above you. The creature posing as the divinity gave you a sly, sarcastic wink and stepped away from your sight. The monstress left you to remain in the deteriorating lake that ferries her victims to Nowhere. 

Nothing 

And you wake up. It is now and you are locked away in the forgotten chest of Nowhere. But this time is different. Nowhere’s bitter air is not even stale, nor sour. It is without the hope of seeing Everything once again and having one last embrace with Everyone. The box is without walls, without sound, without the ability to hear yourself wail; frantically oblivious to oblivion’s undying nothingness. Nowhere has capitulated to Nothing. Here, beneath Nowhere — where your senses still found you — not even vision finds your eyes. Breath has left your lungs leaving you to perpetually choke on airless contempt.  

Your heart does not pump, leaving you to become a ghostly image of what you were. You float inanimately while still perceiving everything. You cannot hear, but the voices potentize themselves to become dissonant delusions poisoning your head. The light fails to warm your bare skin. The smell of the roses after a refreshing afternoon rain cannot come to your mind. 

Nothing is where your dreams do not follow, and you are crushed by the world passing you by. Nothing is your mindless home where your spirit and soul have abandoned you. Here, your exile from Everything, from Everyone, and from life leaves you as an unfilled sketch. As a silhouette within your immortal nightmare, you fall deep into disillusionment, dull in the numb chatter that plagues your restlessness. The new life you lead is the incoherent, discordant, screeching dissonance that is so incontestably miserable and empty it only drags you downward.

Your written fate that has been assigned to you by the gods and permitted by the stars to strand you in the endless nothingness of the void, floating in eternal anguish with no one to talk to, nothing to hear, and only the blankness of Nothing to guide you Nowhere.