Mostly Void, Partially Stars

Sometimes things seem so strange or malevolent, and then you find that, underneath, it was something else altogether, something pure and innocent.

I fear, Night Vale. I fear for what we know. I fear for what we don’t know. I fear for what we don’t yet know that we don’t know

But as you watch the sun rise again tomorrow morning, think to yourself: “Past performance is not a predictor of future results.” And then force a smile, drink another cup of coffee, and try not to look down as you walk across the soil that will eventually fill your lifeless lungs and repurpose your corpse. Each day that is . . . is a blessing, Night Vale.

Fear is consciousness plus life. Regret is an attempt to avoid what has already happened. Toast is bread held under direct heat until crisp.

The present tense of regret is indecision. The future tense of fear is either comedy or tragedy. And the past tense of toast is toasted

How much of our lives we spend building complex prophecies of fear when the world itself is just the world we have always known and gotten along in

The council noted that from now on death would be earned through hard work and productivity, not just as a handout for every resource-sucking freeloader on the street. If you want to die, the council said, you will have to achieve death yourself. Not everyone gets to die, and that’s just how it will be

But then you remember, I remember, that we are even now in another bit of molten wax. We are in a moment that it is still falling, still volatile, and we will never be anywhere else. We will always be in that most dangerous, most exciting, most possible time of all: the now, where we never can know what shape the next moment will take

All variety of lost opportunity spied from the windows of public transportation, really.

Time is like wax, dripping from a candle flame. In the moment, it is molten and falling, with the capability to transform into any shape. Then the moment passes, and the wax hits the tabletop, and solidifies into the shape it will always be. It becomes the past, a solid, single record of what happened, still holding in its wild curves and contours the potential of every shape it could have held

But here is the truth of nostalgia: We don’t feel it for who we were, but who we weren’t. We feel it for all the possibilities that were open to us but that we didn’t take