All Our Wrong Todays

by Elan Mastai

In fiction, you cohere all these evocative, telling details into a portrait of the world. But in everyday life, you hardly notice any of the little things. You can’t. Your brain swoops past it all, especially when it’s your own home, a place that feels barely separate from the inside of your mind or the outside of your body.

The ground under you is moving, really fast. Along the equator, the Earth rotates at over 1,000 miles per hour, twenty-four hours a day, while orbiting the Sun at a little over 67,000 miles per hour. That’s 1,600,000 miles per day. Meanwhile our solar system is in motion relative to the Milky Way galaxy at more than 1,300,000 miles per hour, covering just shy of 32,000,000 miles per day. And so on.

If you were to teleport even a few inches in any direction, your body would be embedded in a solid object. One inch, you’re wounded. Two inches, you’re maimed. Three inches, you’re dead. Every second of the day, we’re all three inches from being dead.

It’s weary, cheeky, and wise, which are my three favorite qualities in people and art.

when you invent a new technology, you also invent the accident of that technology.

The Accident doesn’t just apply to technology, it also applies to people. 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.

Unless you’ve touched a corpse before, you can’t comprehend the visceral wrongness of inert flesh wrapped around an inanimate object that wears your mother’s face.

He didn’t need me to tell him he was a genius, and I didn’t. I didn’t need him to tell me I was a disappointment, but he did.

Maturity colonizes your adolescent mind, like an ultraviolet photograph of a vast cosmic nebula that turns out, on closer examination, to be a pointillist self-portrait.

phatic empathy—genuine understanding stripped of pity.

Phatic: denoting or relating to language used for general purposes of social interaction, rather than to convey information or ask questions. Utterances such as hello, how are you? and nice morning, isn't it? are phatic.

That’s how I ended up in an open-air courtyard dotted with sculptures, the life’s work of some artist shoved in an obscure corner to bolster the company’s cultural credibility index.

You didn’t want to go to space to test a rocket ship. You wanted to see things no one’s ever seen before.”