Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

by Lulu Miller

Chaos will crack them from the outside—with a falling branch, a speeding car, a bullet—or unravel them from the inside, with the mutiny of their very own cells. Chaos will rot your plants and kill your dog and rust your bike. It will decay your most precious memories, topple your favorite cities, wreck any sanctuary you can ever build.

He didn’t give up or despair. He did not heed what seemed to be the clear message of the quake: that in a world ruled by Chaos, any attempts at order are doomed to fail eventually. Instead, he rolled up his sleeves and scrambled around until he found, of all the weapons in the world, a sewing needle.

Maybe it was okay to have some outsized faith in yourself. Maybe plunging along in complete denial of your doomed chances was not the mark of a fool but—it felt sinful to think it—a victor?

Time passing, as he slowly dug himself deeper and deeper into a leafy loneliness.

that due to the dense ivy that overtook the walls of his boyhood home, he became a “botanist in self-defense.”

He informed me that there is no meaning of life. There is no point. There is no God. No one watching you or caring in any way. There is no afterlife. No destiny. No plan. And don’t believe anyone who tells you there is. These are all things people dream up to comfort themselves against the scary feeling that none of this matters and you don’t matter. But the truth is, none of this matters and you don’t matter.

“as special as you might feel, you are no different than an ant. A bit bigger, maybe, but no more significant”—he

So live as you please.

To stare our pointlessness in the face, and waddle along toward happiness because of it.

Mud pies and fireflies and dams.

Maybe such unruly persistence is beautiful. Maybe it is not mad, after all. Maybe it is the quiet work of believing in Good. Of believing in a warmth, which you know does not exist in the stars, to exist in the hearts of fellow humans.

“There is no hope for you unless this bit of sod under your feet is the sweetest to you in this world—in any world”—and

“Nowhere is the sky so blue, the grass so green, the sunshine so bright, the shade so welcome, as right here, now, today.”

Consider the case of the cyanobacteria. A tiny green speck in the sea, so insignificant to the human eye that for centuries we didn’t even have a name for it. Until one day in the 1980s when scientists accidentally discovered it was producing a significant portion of the oxygen we breathe. Now we revere it, this tiny green speck, Prochlorococcus marinus; we fight to protect it.

There was no way of overcoming Chaos, no guide or shortcut or magic phrase to guarantee everything would end up okay.

The longer we examine our world, the stranger it proves to be. Perhaps there will be a mother waiting inside a person deemed unfit. Perhaps there will be medicine inside a weed. Salvation inside the kind of person you had discounted.

Is this storm a bummer? Maybe it’s a chance to get the streets to yourself, to be licked by raindrops, to reset. Is this party as boring as I assume it will be? Maybe there will be a friend waiting, with a cigarette in her mouth, by the back door of the dance floor, who will laugh with you for years to come, who will transmute your shame to belonging.