The beginning and the end.

He was born in the void, the monster, the initial sketch. The something. He, he was him.
He did not speak, he could not do so, he could not think of doing so because nothing was everything that there was not in the nothingness. Only the infinite white existed, a canvas without a brush, a silence so deep that it was not even silence, because silence needs sound in order to define itself and there there was no definition at all.

He, who was he?, What was “he”?, What was it that he was doing? Thought. Thinking. Wondering. Wondering, what other things could he wonder? What is this? Curiosity. Curiosity tore through the stillness like an invisible needle and he felt a new tremor, the first echo of something that was not absence. He wondered, and with his questions he created the something. A something in the nothingness, an existence in non-existence but… Was he not an existence? He questioned himself, Question himself? Question himself. He walked himself through the white. Walk, white? With what did he walk? With what, does one need a something for an action? Yes, a body, but Actions? Yes, actions. He looked down, seeing his body, his own body that he had not looked at before because looking required direction and direction did not exist. He saw his hands: lines, shadows, folds that he did not understand but that were his. Own, are there others? Yes, but not here, not in the nothingness. The nothingness? The absence of something, but now there is something in the nothingness, so the nothingness is no longer the nothingness, now it is a something surrounded by white spaces to be filled, mute extensions that wait. But… Now, time? Yes, time, now, tomorrow, yesterday. Now he was here; tomorrow would be a place to arrive at; yesterday, a trace that he had not yet left. He thought, walked and acted, experienced, questioned and kept going, tracing invisible furrows upon the whiteness, until someone appeared before him.

—A name, you need a name, I can barely tell you apart from the white abyss where we are. —The figure spoke. Its voice had contour, weight, a temperature that was neither cold nor hot but present. He listened. Listen, speak? The sound entered him the way rain enters dry earth, and he knew that listening was different from thinking. He parted his lips, felt the new friction of flesh against flesh.
—What is a name? —He asked the figure, who observed the something with an ancient attention, a gaze that had already looked long before the something existed.
—William will be yours, you are my creation, you are something. In this infinite nothingness and you, you will be in charge of filling it. —The figure declared before fading into the infinite whiteness, like a candle that goes out not with smoke, but with more light.
He stood there, alone. He looked at his hands and murmured “William?” He was no longer He, now he was something, no. Now he was *someone*. Someone who could be named, invoked, remembered. Someone who occupied a place in a sentence and, therefore, in existence.

Then William thought. Create, what is creating? Creation and destruction, filling the white. The white? A colour, Colours? What would dye the world. And names would be what created things, because naming was the first breath, the first rib. William thought and gave a name to his thoughts, thus creating things. He said “light” and a warm clarity spilled over the white; he said “firmament” and above a vault curved, separating what was above from what was below; he said “earth” and the dust gathered into plains and mountains that rose timidly, as if they did not yet know how to be ground. He said “water” and the water obeyed, gathering in seas and rivers that learned to sing with movement. William thought of himself, of the loneliness that resembled the nothingness, and he created someone alike, but that someone was not like him, was not a spark born from the primordial void, but was like the nothingness. For he was empty. So he thought of something to fill him: feelings, emotions and… Thoughts. And he breathed into that hollow body curiosity, fear, desire, tenderness. And so he created the first man, calling him as such. He let him live in the world he had created, walk under the trees that sprouted upon hearing his steps, drink from the water that did not yet know thirst. William appeared from time to time to name him, just as the figure had done, giving him the name “Man.” And man, in turn, learned to name the beasts, the flowers, the stars, multiplying the something until the white began to recede like a defeated tide.

Time passed little by little, with each questioning and question that William asked himself; the nothingness diminished, and soon, sooner than he thought, the void would disappear. The edges of the world expanded with each new word, and the original silence was cornered in the places where no one had yet looked. Soon a green would bloom, and the sky would be dyed blue, concepts would be born—justice, beauty, oblivion—and consequences would be unleashed, because every name brings with it its shadow. Then the figure would appear to him and speak to him.

—You did well, *you created* and filled the nothingness with something as I asked you. —Declared the figure, with a smile of satisfaction on its face that seemed to hold all the answers William had not yet formulated.
—Now I do tell you apart from the something, you are the only nothingness that remains. The nothingness remains in the uncertainty you represent, William. —William blinked, Uncertainty? It was that feeling he felt when his questions had no answers, the void carried inside the chest, the echo that returns without a reply.
—I am the nothingness? —Nothing more than nothingness is what you are. But from the nothingness you were born and the nothingness you filled with your something, yet you did not fill yourself with the something. —The figure answered, vanishing again, leaving behind a wake of absence denser than the one before.
William stood in the midst of the landscapes he had created, surrounded by trees, mountains and the first man who slept beneath the newly invented stars, wondering What did it mean? Feeling uncertainty at not knowing the answer. And that uncertainty ached the way a limb not yet touched aches.