On the consequences of space

Aspects

I hadn’t realized the full implications of it. I probably never will. But I discovered a new aspect of it recently. It negates nothing that came before, only adds something. Why did everything that followed that first look at my birth certificate—his name, his company, all his constellations and conspiracies—have no effect on that space?

Before it was a space, it was a silence, and it had an aura of hope around it. It was as if, at any moment, it could be filled, and all the pain that was caused by it, would magically vanish with the fact of his existence. He could walk through the door with his arms spread, asking, where is my son; Where is he? I am here, Father. Would you look at that…My god, you’re so big. I’ve missed you; I’ve missed so much. I am sorry. And he would reach low to my toddling hurry and lift me up, our eyes meeting, blue hues matching. There you are. And all that came before would vanish. All the consequences of the silence merely growing pains to a full height, remembered as painful but worth it instead of not.

But when I found that document, there was a finality. I knew it, plain as my name and his absence. A finality that stretched to include all future dreams and nightmares, all the daydreams and wish lists. Nothing changed, mind you. The certificate’s acknowledgement was only of what I already knew. Silence. And the space was just silence in writing. Nothing in that translation was new or arrived as further evidence than what was already understood.

He was not there—no, something else, because he was not somewhere in opposition to being there. He wasn’t missing either; there were no flyers, no one professed missing him, not even me. By the way people acted and never spoke, he wasn’t dead; they whispered around the subject, as though he were close and consequential. He just…wasn’t. I don’t know. Almost like how the Roman’s never came up with a numeral to represent zero. There is no representation of nothing. He wasn’t gone or missed or missing, he was always zero. So that space on the certificate is not a further echo of silence, as I had thought until recently. It is a zero.

The finality I felt holding it was a realization that the space was not momentary but eternal, stretching forward for all time and backward for all time. As I was zero, before conception, then moving to I, my entrance into the world accompanied a fact. Zero.

It wasn’t a miscommunication or an unfortunate accounting error. It wasn’t .02 or .99, a rounding error. That zero was purposeful. It was decided by all present and all witnesses, all those involved knew it. Who was my father?

As often as a father is named for any child, that name understood as any other fact of a person’s life, stretching forward with all the consequences that that name might inflict on the world, so too, does the zero. The space was not waiting to be filled by an eventual father; it is, to this day, not empty and waiting for a typing stroke of sire definition. The space was applied as per custom, and any father’s name is on a birth document, as per fact. So nothing changed the day I found my birth certificate—I didn’t feel changed—only, I guess, I knew that nothing was going to change. That the silence I obsessed over, impatiently waiting for what would come to fill it, was an everlasting, purposeful silence, represented the best possible way by those required.

I could wait all I wanted, in the deafening silence, for nothing was coming. A zero added to anything is only the thing itself, unchanged. No amount of desperate prayer or deluded logic can change that