Refill

Emptiness. Like when you finish a perfectly well prepared drink, the one you enjoyed for around twenty minutes, depending on the speed of your drinking habits. You cling on to that glass almost tenderly, you savor its content and appreciate the design of the item itself, it’s pretty and cold; your fingers establish a connection to the moistly material and your lips seal the encounter with not one but several kisses. Twenty minutes in which you begin to develop some sort of affection to it, until it is empty.

What do you do with an empty glass?

Some will save it if there is a meaning attached to the object and it will sit in a shelf for a while until it loses significance. What normally happens is that you try to order a new glass of the same drink, sometimes people try to be creative and they ask for something different, taking the risk of not liking what the new content may be like. It may seem too sweet, or sour, or stronger that what they expected or what they are used to have. In the event that they like it they will probably stick to it until it’s gone and restart the process all over again. But what if they don’t like it? If even after one or two sips they just don’t grow fond to that particular drink; well they leave it and ask for a new one, most likely the same one they ordered first, go on the safe side.

And the almost-full glass remains there, untouched and ignored. It will probably end up thrown away, because no one will have a drink that has been tasted already. It never gets to be emptied; it was not given the possibility to. And it goes on and on like that. Empty drinks that complete their duties and become useless, never able to receive, always condemned to give and give; never getting anything in return. People who get used to replace an empty glass with a new one, not thinking about maybe switching places and filling the glass with their own contents and then continuing. No, empty? Gone. New one, please; same drink or maybe a new one, let’s find out what happens. What’s the worst thing that could result? Shattered glass? It doesn’t really matter, its disposable after all.

Sinks filled with empty tall crystal glasses that lie on top of the other just wondering about why were they left like that when they still had so much to give, hidden underneath the surface of heavy liquor; the cold touch on moistly fingertips remains… And so does the desire to receive what has been taken from them.

Maybe emptiness does not exist at all and it’s only our mind that creates it out of boredom and lack of commitment, maybe it’s the other way around, maybe we are overfilled and just not capable of noticing it.