Midsummer hangs listlessly in the air. The suffocating heat has dried out the city streets. Everywhere I look, it's all haze - long, unfaltering haze. Yellow grass across the edges of the field, even nature seems to have abandoned its offsprings. Emptiness. Old pages flicker silently in the air, crossing the borders of Time with ease. Layers peel back, withered like leaves, soaked and trampled underfoot in those dark and cloudy winter nights, and reveal dead skin, carcasses of what-has-once-been. How silent the earth is. No whisper of wind, no flutter of wings, no dog bark, no human speech. Silence. Not even the faint hum of the ever-working city machine. Everyone, no, everything has vanished, gone without a trail is all but the sweltering stench of the scorching sun, even the grass seems to have moved on, a corpse devoid of life. Silence - an endless desert before my gaze. I gaze upon those layers, a cloud of ashy butterflies frozen in flight; how does even ash become nothingness? Do the molecules that make it up break down further and further into atoms? Do, then, atoms break down further and further into subatoms? Do subatoms become smaller and smaller until they're but just a wave passing the endless landscape of space? Does the wave vanish into the quantum or does it break away from the known boundaries of time and space? Time and space. Innumerable, immeasurable, boundless. Time and space. The ashy butterflies flutter their wings, each motion bound to its own time and space, invisible for my perception. Tick-tock, a flutter, tick-tock, a hand upon the face of the Cosmological clock moves in its obscured way. I gaze upon I, stuck in that limbo as the little specks bleed off of the butterflies' wings. As past, future and present come together, a continuously disintegrating whole is made, wrapping upon and unto itself with only one state of existence - inexistent. As the Wholes erratically vanish and come into being, the beginning and the end become one and what Is cannot be made up of what is Not. Nothing intricate can exist if the foundation it is made of has never come into being. A desert. An endless, infinite, unfathomable desert. Specks of dust bleed upon it, join and merge and twist into it as the desert keeps shedding itself, molecules, atoms, electors and neutrons all caught in a blend of devouring and being devoured as it all sinks between the cracks of realms fusing and breaking apart. A desert. An endless, infinite, unfathomable desert devoid of anything at all. There's no sand, no ash, no specks of dust here for these things cannot exist out of the void - what has never lived cannot die, what has never existed cannot be named. I do not gaze upon I. I do not gaze upon nothing. Nothing cannot gaze upon anything, and upon the canvas of this eternal desert, the singular does not exist. The singular becomes the plural and the plural becomes the singular itself and that cycle continues as the pattern grows until it is all but nothing, for nothing truly exists in the space between the fluter of the butterfly wings. Nothing is nothing. Nothing is I.