It began not with a bang, but with a lingering aftertaste. Elias first noticed it after a bite of a flavorless tomato, the kind grown for durability, not delight. The watery flesh was gone, but something remained on his tongue. It wasn’t sour or sweet or bitter; it was the taste of a gap. A clean, resonant absence. He swished water in his mouth, but the sensation persisted, like the memory of a bell’s chime after the sound has faded.
His world had become a buffet of blandness. The creeping inflation made every purchase a calculation, hollowing out the joy of small pleasures. At his job, he performed a kind of professional séance, channeling the semblance of productivity into spreadsheets that meant nothing. He was a pioneer of quiet quitting, having mentally clocked out years before the phrase became fashionable. He simply lowered his own expectations to a point of subterranean peace. His boss, a man whose entire being was a monument to hustle culture, would talk of synergy and empowerment, a classic bit of gaslighting to disguise the fact that they were all just rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.
The aftertaste returned. After a vapid conversation with a neighbor. After a night of aimless doomscrolling through curated hysterias. It was the flavor of static between stations, the cool smoothness of a wall painted renter’s white. He started to chase it. He’d perform a dopamine detox not for clarity, but for that specific, empty flavor. He’d sit in his silent apartment and breathe, waiting for it to gather on his palate. He told his friend, Mark, about it.
“You’re just depressed, man,” Mark said, fiddling with invoices for his struggling craft brewery. “The supply chain is a nightmare, everything costs double, and you’re tasting… nothing? Sounds a bit delulu, if you ask me.”
But Elias knew it wasn’t depression. Depression had a taste: chalky, metallic, like an old coin. This was different. This was pure.
He found the others by accident. In a stark, white gallery downtown, a woman named Lyra was having a showing. There were no paintings. The walls were bare. The pedestals were empty. The room was filled with people standing perfectly still, their eyes half-closed, a look of profound concentration on their faces. As Elias stepped inside, the taste flooded his mouth, overwhelming and pristine. It tasted of a forgotten name, of a page before the first word is written. This was the source. Lyra wasn’t an artist of objects, but of spaces. She curated absence.
He became a regular. He learned that this was their aesthetic, their nameless ‘-core’ built around the appreciation of nullity. They were the opposite of those who chased main character energy; they sought the sublime anonymity of the background extra, the silent observer. They didn’t try to manifest abundance; they cultivated a rich and intricate poverty of sensation. It was the ultimate self-care for souls exhausted by the relentless demand to *feel* something all the time.
Lyra, a woman with eyes that seemed to reflect a distant, starless sky, explained it to him once. “The world is too loud,” she whispered, her voice barely disturbing the air. “It screams at you to want, to buy, to be. It fills you up with junk. We’re just creating a space to be empty. To remember the palate of the void.”
Their largest gathering was to be held in a decommissioned reservoir on the edge of the city, an enormous concrete dome that held a perfect, cathedral-like echo. They planned a night of collective silence, a pilgrimage to the peak of their strange connoisseurship.
But as they settled into the cavernous dark, the peace was shattered. A generator roared to life outside, and floodlights blazed through the high windows, scouring the darkness. A cacophony of motivational speeches and club anthems blasted from powerful speakers. It was Elias’s boss, with a handful of his acolytes. He stood at the entrance, microphone in hand, his face a mask of manic certainty.
“I won’t let you morbid freaks rot away!” he bellowed over the din. “This is an intervention! You need passion! You need drive! You need to disrupt!”
The noise was a physical assault. The empty taste in Elias’s mouth curdled, replaced by the acrid burn of forced enthusiasm. The others flinched, shielding their faces. But then Lyra did something unexpected. She didn’t shout back. She didn’t move. She simply closed her eyes and tilted her head back, as if listening to a distant melody. One by one, the others followed her lead.
Elias closed his eyes, too. He ignored the thumping bass and the vapid shouting. He focused. He searched for the gap, the tiny pocket of silence between two deafening heartbeats of the manufactured rhythm. He found it. And in that sliver of quiet, the taste bloomed again—not as a gentle aftertaste, but as a powerful, defiant presence. It was the taste of the space around the tyrant’s words, the taste of the stillness of the concrete beneath the vibrating floor. It was the void pushing back, not by creating a sound of its own, but by deepening its own silence. The noise didn’t stop, but it ceased to matter. It became an irrelevant crust around a boundless, silent core.
When Elias finally opened his eyes, his boss was gone. The lights were off. The silence that remained was the most profound he had ever experienced. It was not empty; it was full of potential.
He walked home under a sky cleansed by the predawn light. He didn’t quit his job. He didn’t abandon the world. But he was no longer its prisoner. The anxieties about unprecedented times and the cost of living were still there, like distant radio chatter, but they no longer occupied the center of his being. He had found a sanctuary within himself.
The next morning, he broke a piece of fresh, crusty bread. He put it in his mouth and chewed slowly. He tasted the wheat, the yeast, the salt, the fire that had baked it. And for the first time, in the spaces between all those wonderful, vivid flavors, he tasted the perfect, clean, and beautiful nothing from which they had all come. And it was delicious.
Leave a Reply