(I posted this on Twitter in late October 2022. I'm reposting it here because I was reminded of it and I still think that it's useful)
"What is Empty Spaces?" is a necessarily doomed question. There is a negative space, an implied existence; but its shape seems different to each probing eye, its edges contort itself to match the contours of each watching mind.
There is a place where there is nothing.
Seen from one angle it resembles an art movement; from another a writer's circle. It's a fandom for something that doesn't exist, a dollish playground replete with witches-in-effigy; it's the meanings we take from it and the offerings whose smoke wafts up towards the absent moon.
It's about identity, and it's about trauma, and it's a specifically traumaqueer lens to interrogate the details of your past, and it's the feeling of "oh, that wasn't normal, was it?" come decades too late to make any difference ...
And it's not. It's really not. It never was.
There's a game we play with meaning, and it goes like this:
I will tell you precisely what I mean in words which do not say what I think they do, and you will use that to destroy me.
It's not a good game. It's only one half of the fork, but the other tine takes too much trust.
None of that is true; all of it is. It's dissembling metaphor and a blacklight cast on the world's suddenly too-vivid gaps; it's a mirror and a kaleidoscope and a broken window glassy teeth waiting to catch your sleeve—
Somewhere that's not here an angel is smoking on an overpass, watching headlights fly past far beneath. She's perched on the railing, wings outstretched, waiting for the next gust of wind to choose for her ...
She takes another drag, exhales.
There's no breeze.
She falls.
