Lost in the Gray

The stillness wakes me.

It reaches into the disarray in my head,
wrapping itself around
every flicker of chaos it finds and
squeezing tightly until
the bumps are smooth and
the noise is gone.

In their place is a sense of nothingness,
a vaguely felt moment in gray.

Nothing
inside me has beauty
or ugliness,
comfort or pain,
but there exists instead
only overwhelming emptiness.

I search for signs of life,
but find none,
and the moment passes,
still silent,
without any color cluttering up my world.

I seek to bend the gray
so color can return,
but in the process, I leave a hole
big enough to welcome chaos home.

Is it better than the nothingness?

More alive than the gray?

I don't know the answers,
but I am confident of this:
My world can't broker emptiness,
can't find itself in gray.

It can only pause
in a room full of nothingness
and witness chaos descending and
everything falling
back into madness.