Welcome to Night Vale

by Joseph Fink

She understood the world and her place in it. She understood nothing. The world and her place in it were nothing and she understood that.

There is nothing more lonely than an action taken quietly on your own, and nothing more comforting than doing that same quiet action in parallel with fellow humans doing the same action, everyone alone next to each other.

A soft tone playing when you wake up, but then it is gone and you don’t know if you dreamed it. A hallway glimpsed in the back of your refrigerator, but when you look again it is gone. The recurring feeling that your shower is losing faith in you. Desperation. Hunger. Starving, not literally, but still. That hallway again, lined with doors that you know you can open. Your fridge is empty. You haven’t left your home in days, and yet you come and go.

She occasionally found herself thinking about love when staring at the many twinkling spy satellites in the night sky, or when the wind tasted like sour peaches for no understood reason, or when she said a word that seemed different than a word she would ever say.

People are beautiful when they do beautiful things. Perhaps he had spent most of his life doing beautiful things and it had really stuck.

It is approximately his ten thousandth day as a human. And yet, for all his days, he is not yet very good at being a human. He still makes a lot of mistakes. All that time and he still is unsure of himself.

“Be well,” they said, as their feet and then the rest of their body melted down into the sidewalk. “Failing that, Jackie, simply be. Simply continue to be.”

Remember that misuse of language can lead to miscommunication, and that miscommunication leads to everything that has ever happened in the whole of the world.