The Nothing That Is

by Kyle Winkler

Everyone chained to capitalism wanted to view their job as being a part of building some massive cathedral over multiple generations. But in reality it was more like building a temporary outhouse near a battlefield.

I knew then that any emotional sadness I felt was merely the slow evolution of chemicals and acids and particles weaving and dancing so blindly through time and meeting so purely by chance in that dance, that to deny the meaningless providence of it, the sheer opacity of hurt it was meant to calculate, was to deny the process altogether. One thousand million years had unfolded themselves to this moment of pain and decision.