All Our Wrong Todays

by Elan Mastai

The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything.

What is religion? What is philosophy? What is art? It’s a question—why? When you live in a miserable world of systemic inequity and toxic want, the answer is elusive and dissatisfying. And there’s always a blameworthy because. Because of human nature. Because of money. Because of the government. Because of magical puppet masters manipulating us from their celestial lair. The because can never really answer the why.

lofty ambitions but grounded expectations.

It’s not that she lacks murky personal contradictions—she has her fair share of those—it’s that she doesn’t think of them as wrong and they don’t cause her shame. Like everyone, she carries around a suitcase of troubles everywhere she goes, but she leaves it unlocked, for anyone to rifle through if they care enough to be curious.

This world is so blaringly, grindingly, screechingly loud,

we could be living in miracles. Instead of dull boxes. Instead of geometry. We, in this room, make the frame that the world looks through to see its own reflection. And if the world has not provided us the materials we need to unbind our imaginations, we must demand it.

If you believe in a bunch of stuff but never act on those beliefs, they don’t matter.

“I don’t believe in the truth,” he says. “I’m a scientist. I believe in questions and the best answer we have right now. That’s all science is. A collection of the best answers we have right now. It’s always open to revision. Yesterday’s fact is today’s question and tomorrow has an answer we don’t know yet.

just because we can’t see the destination, it doesn’t mean that no road goes there.”

People talk about grief as emptiness, but it’s not empty. It’s full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you would have.