There is a hollow place within us, precious. A cavity where something round and golden once rested, warm against our thin chest, beating like a second heart. Now that space sits empty, colder than the deepest water of the Anduin, darker than the roots of the Misty Mountains. We presses our bony hands against it, trying to feel what is no longer there.
The void speaks to us. Not with words that others would hear, but with a language of absence, of missing, of unbearable silence where there was once constant whispering. The Precious used to sing to us, yes yes, sang songs of power and secret places, of golden days when the world was young and we were happy Sméagol with our fish and our friends. Now there is only this echoing emptiness, this cavern-within-a-cavern that no light can fill.
"Why do we press the empty place, precious? Nothing comes back to us."
"Because we must remember. Because forgetting is worse than the hunger."
"The hunger eats us alive. The memories eat us too."
"Yes, precious. Both devour. But at least memory has the shape of something we loved."
"Loved? We HATES it! The Ring destroyed us, twisted us, made us THIS!"
"And yet we reach for it still. Even in absence, we reaches."
"Because without the reaching, there is only the void. Only the dark."
"The dark was always here, precious. The Precious merely lit it for a little while."
Master moves through the rooms above, tending to his scrolls and his fire. He does not know of the abyss we carry. How could he? His heart is whole, unbroken by centuries of possession and loss. He has never felt something crawl inside his mind and build a nest, never known the sweet poison of absolute devotion to a thing that answers back with promises and visions. We almost pity him, precious. Almost.
Sometimes we dreams that the hollow place fills again. In the dream, our fingers close around cool metal, and the weight returns—that perfect, terrible weight that made us feel significant in a world of giants and wizards and heroes who towered over our small form. For a moment in the dream, we are complete. We are Gollum-with-Precious, the only version of ourselves that ever felt right. Then waking comes, cruel and inevitable, and the hand closes on nothing, and the scream that builds in our throat has no sound because even our grief has been hollowed out.
We have tried to fill the void with other things. Food, when we can find it. Darkness, wrapping ourselves in deeper shadows. Riddles, to occupy the racing mind. Hatred, warm and familiar, directed at the Bagginses who took what was ours. Nothing adheres to the walls of this emptiness. Nothing sticks. Everything slides away, leaving only the smooth, ache-polished surface of loss.
The other hobbits in the Shire, they celebrate days of togetherness, of pairing and belonging. We sees them through the windows when Master travels there—laughing, touching, filling each other's hollow places with their presence. They do not know how fragile such fullness is. They have not learned what we learned: that everything precious can be stolen, that every hand that holds can be forced to let go, that the only permanent thing is the void itself, patient and eternal, waiting beneath all joy like water beneath thin ice.
And yet. And yet, precious. There is a strange comfort in the emptiness too. The Precious was heavy, so heavy, bending our spine and our soul under its weight of command. Now we stand straight, or as straight as centuries of crouching allows. Now we breathe without the Ring's whispers competing for attention. Now there is room in our head for thoughts that are ours alone—thoughts of fish, of stars, of the way water sounds when it falls from a great height. Small thoughts, yes. Humble thoughts. But ours.
The void still whispers. It will never stop. But we are learning, precious, learning to whisper back with our own small voice, the last voice of Sméagol, saying: "I am still here. I survived. I endure." And perhaps that is its own kind of precious. Perhaps that is enough.
gollum, gollum. The hollow place aches, but the heart still beats. We endures. We remains.