It’s not so easy writing about nothing.

So begins Patti Smith’s “M Train.” 

These days I find it hardest to write about nothing, nothing with its absence of boundaries, direction, nothing that is everything that is the case.

When I was sixteen, though, I could write pages and pages of words about nothing, speak hours of it, too.

What is this Smith’s nothing?

Things that make up our time. Things that fill our mind in complicated patterns, dreamlike but also palpably real. Here, hold this cup of hot black coffee, let it warm your hands, dip a piece of brown toast in olive butter, and listen as I tell you about a dream I had last night. This dream will spread its tentacles to the past and the future, and I’ll bring you what it grabs and show it to you, and tell you what it means to me.

Isn’t it most honest to speak without an agenda? Isn’t it the hardest?

I get so enthralled in the nothingness of her lyrical wandering that my own dreams acquire a voiceover in Smith’s poetic sentences. Wonderfully strange.

Ghosts abide in the mind of a person who’s lived somewhat. They are introduced. They are that strange breed between reality and fiction, no longer there, yet forever alive here on the pages. And you wonder, for a hundredth time, how is it that you can share that pain, that longing of a person you’ve never met for another person you don’t know. How can you also live through that solitude, when your own house is full of people. It doesn’t make you reach for a gratitude journal, doesn’t ignite pity or self-pity, it is just a part of human experience, and you absorb it, mesmerised. 

Nothing is really everything, and everything is nothing. I don’t like these types of phrases, yet I keep turning it around in my mind, spinning it like a coin, seeing which way it will land. It brings me an unexplainable feeling of contentment. In a way a poem can. In a way this book did. In a way life sometimes does.