All Our Wrong Todays

by Elan Mastai

Every person you meet introduces the accident of that person to you. What can go right and what can go wrong. There is no intimacy without consequence.

I remember, as a kid, when I first understood that only half of every tree is visible, that the roots in the soil are equal to the branches in the sky, that a whole other half is underground. It took me a lot longer, well into adulthood, to realize people are like that too.

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.

Then again, are any of our choices actual choices? The brain is a soupy lightning storm swirling and crackling in three pounds of wet meat. Do conscious decisions even exist, or is everything an instinctual response gussied up with malformed logic?

“but what if every creative idea that someone has is unconsciously borrowed from that person’s experiences in another reality? Maybe all ideas are plagiarized without us knowing it, because they come to us through some cryptic and unprovable reality slippage?”