First created May 20th, 2025
Last edited May 20th, 2025
A body sits at a desk in a room. It stares blankly into a screen, rests its hands on a dusty keyboard. It sighs deeply, awash in the warm orange of string lights and the faint grey of a cloudy spring evening creeping through an open window. It does not exist.
Beyond the room is a building of many halls and floors. Other bodies wander these halls, find respite in their own rooms, find companionship in each other, find purpose in their work. Some bodies care for the building, vacuuming its carpets, wiping its windows, fixing broken pipes and cleaning growths from shower crevices. In this way, the building and the bodies that reside in it exist in symbiosis, like leafcutter ants upon a tree. They do not exist.
Beyond the building is a parking lot. Black asphalt and concrete sidewalks are darkened by the dampness of fresh rain, cars of many shapes and sizes align themselves with each other in neat rows along painted lines. Sparse bodies occasionally wander to and fro, from the building to a car and back again. Some cars come and go, always bearing bodies, though not often leaving them. They too, do not exist.
Beyond the parking lot is a forest. Green grass and underbrush line the bases of enormous pine trees, reaching toward the cloudy sky like hands trying to part them. Their branches sway tendril-like in whipping wind, thinner ones fall victim to the strain and gravity as they plummet. Bodies wander this forest too, not just the ones that inhabit cars and rooms, but those that skitter, those that chitter, those that scramble through the detritus and further below, into the wet soil. Those that sweep through the branches on wings of black and mottled brown, those that prowl and stalk on paws with claws fit to cull the weak. Many bodies of many kinds, wander and inhabit the green. They do not exist.
Beyond the forest is an ocean. Boats skim its surface on diesel engines and captured wind, commanded by bodies often lonely, or drunk. Beneath blue-gray tides lies an entire world of bodies, finned and spiked and hard-shelled and toothy. Deeper still, and more bodies lie, between sand and rock and coral reef and skeleton. Deeper still, and yet more bodies lie, in the place where light no longer is, where minnow and monster thrive and die. They do not exist.
Beyond the ocean is a world. Beyond the world are more worlds, great uncaring things among a canvas of pure black. Cold rocks and metallic hydrogen and great spheres of nuclear fire, all whirling and orbiting each other like ice dancers upon a great cosmic rink. Clouds of matter and star-graves, atomic beacons and great annihilators, and who knows? More bodies, possibly. Yet still, they do not exist.
And beyond that? Beyond everything? Beyond everything, there is nothing. And it does not exist.