The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

What did it matter to wake up at the same time every morning and wear the same clothes and try to eat more protein but less sugar, when an earthquake or a tsunami or a bomb might end it all at any minute? Or maybe we would all continue to boil, slowly but surely, in the mess that we pretended was an acceptable place to live.

you spend so much of your life adhering to all of these rules and ideas—keep everything orderly, keep busy, look presentable. When we stopped following these basic tenets, I realized how meaningless they had been.