If there is something in this world worse than desolation, I cannot name it. It is like being torn away from the sun. In lightless, directionless drift, there isn't anything to guide me, or provide meaning to my motions. Existing is terrifying. There needs to be something else. Nothing happens. Nothing is there to happen.

I think desolation comes from a separation of the soul. Not necessarily from other souls, but from everything. From the whole person. And there's this tearing, because I'm stuck on both sides and they can't reach one another. I'm the soul on the one side, miserable and whimpering, her face pushed into her knees, holding out her hand and waiting for someone to take it, and I'm the Other, the mind part, trying to find some way to shape nothingness into a tool so that I can swim across the void, and get to her.

To be alone... to be alone isn't just being apart from other people. That's a flimsy sort of loneliness compared to this. Being desolate is being apart from yourself, unable to reach yourself no matter what method you try to employ. No screaming silence. No forceful immersion in worlds of words. The last resolve is simply nothing.

It is in nothing that the answers finally materialise. Because all I'm really missing is the chance to talk to myself. The Other keeps pulling levers and pushing buttons, waiting for some effect because that's what it always does. It rocks the soul and gives it food and scrapes the filth clinging to it as though it were an infant, attending to mechanical needs. But she isn't a child. Sometimes she just needs to talk in her own wordless language, and hear the Other say things back.

I'm still light-years away from myself. But it's light that bridges the distance, and makes me me again.

A collision of worlds would just be another sort of hell.