How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you?

If I weigh myself down, everything is lost.

It may be that what you could be haunts you. It is real. It is a weight you have to carry around. Each failure to become, to be, is a weight. Each state you could inhabit is a burden as heavy as any physical weight, but more so, because it weighs on your soul. It is the ghost of your possibilities hanging around your neck, an invisible albatros, potentials unknowingly murdered.

he wasn’t even dead. But when there is suddenly that emptiness in your home and in your heart, the loss feels very similar to death.

To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn't realize we were carrying in the first place.

The absence of lost things is felt most painfully when the things you possess stop providing satisfaction.

Insignificant events can take on monumental proportions when your head is full of practically nothing.

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Sometimes I feel so- I don’t know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going’
Like a little lost Sputnik?’
I guess so.

It’s a good feeling to be empty-handed, to feel naked as if a whole life was blown off my back by a storm. (p105)

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

That feeling of terrible emptiness when I touched him was like going into a house that you thought would be full of people you loved, only to find it empty, and even the furniture taken. You walk from room to room, hearing your footsteps echo on the naked floors. Your voice bounces back from the empty walls, where the lines of beloved photos still show like the line around a body at a crime scene. He was gone.

Puts a weight on ya. Goin' out lookin' for somepin you know you ain't gonna find.

I was frozen like in a dream when your feet weigh fifty pounds each and the danger is almost upon you.