We Are Here to Hurt Each Other

by Paula D. Ashe

There’s another face beneath your face. You’ll see it, peeking out from behind the face you were born with, only revealing itself in the half light. It is what you looked like Before, when you were Unstructured.

He is porous, his skin dotted with lesions that serve as peepholes into his grotesque anatomy. He is a grammar of putrid colors.

Recognizing the universe as it is—a cosmic slaughterhouse unending—is difficult as the machinations of reality function only to deceive sentient beings into believing there is some meaning behind the echoing chaos.

Pain is the source of all matter. It is the force that holds the universe together, that will tear it apart, only to rebuild again. Throughout the ages, humanity asks over and over again “why are we here?” and then pretends as if the Void does not bellow the answer back every single time.

We are here to hurt each other. Again, and again, and again, in perpetuity.

His stories are storms.

Nobody wins against an absence.