There are times in every writer’s life when s/he has nothing to say, but there is no way to express five minutes of dead silence on a blank piece of paper. To write about nothingness is a strange paradox which entails expressions of emptiness that thoroughly contradict the impossibility of words signifying nothing because a word does not exists that doesn’t signify something even when that signified is nothing. “Nothing” is still something. It’s like trying to clear your mind and encountering a series of images that invade the space regardless of how hard you try to make your mind blank. The space in an empty box is still space even when it is not filled with anything. In music, silence is signified by rests, and rests are something. The number zero, though it signifies no quantity still has the value of nothing. What is really weird about zero is that you cannot divide another number by it, which means zero signifies a very singular number or quantity. Often, those who say they have nothing to say just don’t want to talk about what is happening, so their silence is a metaphor for all of the things they would like to say: silence may be golden but it also speaks volumes. Perhaps the real question is why we have so many signifiers for expressing emptiness, but this is not a simple conundrum or enigma. When counting down, we count down to zero, which means no time is left, but how do you know you have arrived at zero, at lift off unless the zero is saving another “second” which serves as the temporal space in which lift-off occurs. On the other hand, stop watches start at zero, marking no time before the gun sounds and the runners are off. After you take a picture off of the wall, it will often leave a mark which now indicates that the wall is empty, even though it is still a wall. A blank wall is not the same as a empty wall. From an existential viewpoint is an elevator ever really empty? I’m not going to mention a glass which may or may not be half full or half empty of water, being neither an optimist nor a pessimist at the moment. We talk about “space” but really mean “empty space” which is an interesting redundancy. Any attempt and creating nothingness out of writing must be necessarily end in frustration, which is, on a Friday night in late November, just fine, realizing, of course, that some things are impossible to do even when they are both uncountable and unmeasurable. Nothingness is an exercise in futility, futility being the outcome of immobility or immutability, either one. So the next time you empty a bottle and you look into the bottom, you have to ask yourself, is this bottle really empty? My point is this: expressing nothing has to mean you expressing something, even when that is nothing. The metaphysics of non-existence are sublime, enigmatic, and ambiguous, devolving into discussions best left to philosophers and saints, mostly because the idea of non-existence or nothingness is ephemeral, fleeting, dark. Who could guess that the problem of (non)existence could be at once a question of linguistic inexactness and structural polemics. You can’t prove non-existence, which is a bit like dividing by zero. If something is missing, even its empty space is perceivable. So the question remains, then, do we actually understand nothing at all?