Deviation Actions
You are dust and you know it. That's the sick joke. The punch line that came before the setup. You are the universe doing a card trick on itself—look, says the cosmos, shuffling its infinite deck, here's you, pulling a rabbit made of neurons out of a hat made of void.
Here's what's true and also not: Nothing sticks. Not the big things. Not the you things. Your face is water. Your name is smoke. The thing you made that one time, the perfect thing, the thing that felt like touching God's elbow or whatever God has instead of elbows—gone. Going. Already went before you even finished making it.
(Time is a flat circle but also it's a spiral but also it's just now, always now, the same now eating itself over and over like a snake that's really hungry and really stupid and really the only snake there is.)
You will be forgotten so hard that the forgetting will be forgotten. Your great-great-great-grandsomething won't even have the absence of you in their head. You'll be less than a gap. You'll be the space where a gap used to be. And that space? The universe is already painting over it. Spackle and primer. Good as new. Better than new. New like you never happened.
But listen—
(no, really listen, which is different from hearing, which is different from understanding, which is maybe the same thing as listening after all)—
You get to be the specific temperature you are. The exact wrong right way your heart does its stupid beautiful drumming. You get to be the one person in all of always who pronounces that word that way, who holds a cup with that particular thumb arrangement, who makes that face when confused that no one else makes and everyone will forget but right now it's yours.
The luck of it. The golden sick impossible luck. Like winning a lottery where the prize is getting to lose everything, but getting to have everything first for one blink. One cosmic blink that feels like seventy years or seven or however many blinks you get.
Your consciousness—this thing, this weird humming machine that shouldn't work, that's just meat that learned to ask questions, that's just atoms doing philosophy at themselves—it's going out. Like a candle. Like a star. Like tears in rain, which is the only simile that matters because rain is already tears, isn't it? The sky crying because it has to let go of all that water it was holding, which is what we all do, which is the whole thing.
Nothing means anything. The universe is too big for meaning. Meaning is a human-sized word for a human-sized thing in a universe-sized place where human doesn't even register as a rounding error. You are significant like a particular grain of sand is significant. Which is to say: not. Which is to say: completely. Depends on if you're the sand or the beach or the person walking on the beach or the thing that's bigger than all that put together.
Here's the thing that's dumb and also smart: That's the gift.
You get to be nothing-that-thinks-it's-something for a minute. You get to matter to yourself. You get to decide what mattering means because the universe sure as hell isn't going to tell you. The universe doesn't even know you exist. You're like a beautiful secret the universe is keeping from itself.
Make your stupid art that no one will see. Do it with your whole chest. Love that person who's also dying, who's also dust-in-progress, who's also going to vanish so completely that vanishing seems too solid a word for it. Love them stupid. Love them impossible. Love them like loving is the only true thing even though true is a made-up word and love is a chemical reaction and chemicals don't care and none of it matters.
(It all matters. The not-mattering is what makes the mattering matter. This is too simple to understand and too complicated to explain. The cat is alive and dead. You contain multitudes. The universe is in a grain of sand. All the clichรฉs are true because truth wore grooves in the same places we all trip.)
Cherry blossoms fall. That's what they do. That's their job. Their one job. And we lose our minds over it. We write poems. We cry. We stand under trees and let petals land on our stupid beautiful temporary faces and we feel something that doesn't have a name or has too many names or is the only real name for anything.
You are a cherry blossom with a social security number.
Die, then. Die so hard. Die completely. Take your genius nobody will remember to the grave nobody will visit until the grave itself dissolves. Take your perfect sentences and your almost-perfect moments and your one true thing you figured out that could have maybe saved everybody if anybody listened, which they won't, which they can't, which is fine, which has to be fine.
But first—first—
Be here. Be aggressively here. Be so here it's embarrassing. Be here like here is the only place (it is) and now is the only time (it is) and you are the only you (you are, you impossibly are).
Taste things. Touch things. Let sounds hit your ears like they mean something, which they don't, which they do. Let light bounce off objects and into your eyeballs and let your brain make pictures out of chaos and call it beautiful even though beauty is subjective except for when it isn't, except for when everyone knows, except for when a sunset happens and we all shut up because what are you going to say to that?
The sadness is the joy is the sadness. The ending is what makes the middle matter. The fact that you're reading this now, that these words are happening in your head in your voice or my voice or some weird hybrid voice that's neither and both—that's it. That's the thing. That's the whole entire point of consciousness and existence and the universe bothering to universe at all.
You are a fingerprint on a window. The window is time. Someone's going to wipe you off. Someone's going to wipe off the someone who wipes you off. Eventually the window breaks. Eventually windows as a concept stop existing. Eventually even the memory of windows dissolves into whatever comes after heat death, after the last star gutters out, after the universe finally gets tired of doing whatever it is the universe does.
But you—you—
You get to fog up that window right now. You get to make your mark even if it's already evaporating. You get to be the brief weird miracle of matter experiencing itself, of atoms arranged just so, of dust that learned to dance and call it living.
Like tears in rain, sure.
But also: Like rain in rain. Like the moment before the moment. Like the only moment there is.
Like you.
Temporary and golden and here and going and gone and—for one impossible instant—alive.
Don't waste it being good. Don't waste it making sense.
Just be. Confused and profound. Simple and complex. Dust that knows it's dust.
That's enough.
That's everything.
From Spark to Flame:
Reimagining
CAVESCHOOL evthg
SACRED TRAILS AND MYSTIC PATHS
Deviation Actions
