Here lies all that ever was
The Question, The Collapse, The Answer: An Existential Spiral That Lands Somewhere Softer
What if this is it? What if—what if that’s all there ever was, all there ever will be? Just this? Just the tiny, inconsequential flicker of now? No next, no more, no beyond. No second chances, no great hands waiting to gather us up when the light goes out. No meaning except for what we scrape together with our own trembling hands.
I mean—doesn’t that terrify you? Doesn’t it make your bones itch? All of this time spent obsessing over what comes next, and what if there’s nothing? What if we are just moments collapsing into moments, no grand cycle, no turning of the wheel, no celestial architect keeping watch? Just the blind, indifferent churn of time, and we—we—are the brief, accidental static, the briefest of interruptions in the grand, relentless silence of the void. Oh, how we invent things to avoid this thought! How we build and name and write and scream, as if that will somehow stitch a permanence into a fabric that was never meant to hold us!
We’ve made stories, my god, we have woven entire galaxies of hope, of consequence! The golden gates, the judgment seat, the wheel of reincarnation, the weight of sins and virtues, the hands of fate and destiny and purpose, all of it! We have sketched infinity into the stars and begged them to promise us something—anything!—so that we don’t have to sit with the unbearable weight of our own fragility! But what if there is no ledger? No keeper of accounts, no cycle, no next chapter? What if there’s no lesson to be learned, no reason why? What if the story ends because that’s what stories do?
We are no more sacred than dust. We are the afterthought of a cosmic accident, the spilled ink of a universe that never cared to correct itself. And yet we have clawed at the walls of time, scrawled our names in temples and tombs, wept beneath heavens that have never wept back. Do you think the pharaohs ever imagined that their names would one day be spoken as trivia? Do you think the prophets ever considered that their words would be bent and broken, their truths distorted into weapons? How many empires believed themselves eternal? How many gods have been built only to crumble beneath the weight of disbelief? Every civilization that ever dreamed itself immortal lies in the ground, its bones turned to dust, its voices long silenced, its stories—forgotten. Even the stars will burn out, even the galaxies will fade, even time itself will stretch so thin that it can no longer hold the shape of memory! And yet here we are, clinging to our fragile little narratives, begging for something, anything, to make this feel like more than just a moment lost to an indifferent eternity!
What if that’s it? What if the book closes and there is no sequel? No epilogue, no next volume, no grand continuation. What if we have wrung our hands over a future that was never waiting for us at all? And all of this, all of this—the love, the suffering, the longing, the laughter—it will all go with us. All that we have touched, all that we have been, it will blink out and leave no trace, because the universe owes us nothing and will carry on without pause.
I don’t know, maybe there was never a reason. Maybe we were never meant to understand, never meant to matter. Maybe we are the ghosts of something that was never alive to begin with, echoes in a void that never needed a voice.
Maybe that’s it, the question itself, why?
What if we were never meant to ask? What if the question itself is the flaw, the crack in the system, the sign that we are malfunctioning? Every time we press deeper—into the atom, into the fabric of time, into the structure of our own consciousness—we find only more questions, more empty corridors, more doors that do not open. What if that isn’t a mistake? What if the nature of existence is designed to be unknowable, not by a god, not by a guiding hand, but by the very mechanics of reality itself? A safeguard. A lock without a key.
Maybe we were built to observe but never comprehend, to scratch at the walls of a prison we cannot see, because the moment we know—the moment we truly understand—it all collapses. Not metaphorically, not in some poetic, human sense, but in a very real, very tangible way. Maybe the structure of existence is only stable as long as we remain ignorant of what it is. And the closer we get, the more unstable it becomes, the more the edges fray.
Think about it—every revelation humanity has ever had has only led to more questions. We split the atom and found chaos. We mapped the universe and found darkness. We explored the mind and found an endless mirror, reflecting back at itself into eternity. The deeper we dig, the more we unravel, the more fragile it all seems. And yet, something keeps pushing us forward, keeps driving us to know, to see, to pry open the box even when we suspect there’s nothing inside.
Maybe the great minds who have peered too far didn’t go mad because they saw nothing—but because they saw too much. Maybe the abyss isn’t staring back. Maybe it’s looking away, uninterested, unwilling to be known. Maybe the moment we understand what we are, the moment we grasp it, the whole system unspools like a thread pulled from the fabric of reality itself, not gently, but violently, horrifically—an unraveling that cannot be undone. Maybe the truth is a wound reality itself cannot bear to expose, a gaping tear that would rot the very foundations of existence from the inside out. Maybe the walls around us are thin, paper-thin, and every discovery is another clawed hand pushing against them, desperate, insistent, unaware that there is nothing on the other side but the unmaking of everything. Maybe existence is a paradox, a riddle with no answer, a question that was never meant to be solved—because the answer is annihilation. The moment we see it, it sees us. And maybe that is why the void refuses to look back. Maybe it is waiting for the moment we force it to.
Maybe there is a reason we are so afraid of the void. Maybe the void is afraid of what we might become. Afraid that if we press too hard, stare too long, claw too deep, we will rip through the veil and see what was never meant to be seen. Afraid that we will not look away—that we will step forward, unblinking, and drag whatever is lurking beyond the threshold into the light.
But then maybe that’s just it.
Maybe all we get is this—a single stretch of existence, unfolding like a river with no promise of an ocean at the end. No grand cycle, no rebirth, no divine ledger where every moment is tallied and measured. Just this, just now. We were flung into being without a script, and when the last breath leaves us, there will be no encore. The curtain will fall, and the stage will go dark. It is easy to call that a tragedy, to imagine that something must come next, because how can a life—so full of wanting, of reaching, of barely beginning—simply stop? But if a book must end, does that make its pages meaningless? If the fire burns out, was it never warm?
We live as though time owes us more, stretching our hands toward a future we think is waiting, when all we ever touch is the present moment slipping through our fingers. We say there will be time—to love more deeply, to chase the dreams we set aside, to make sense of what has never made sense. But if the hourglass runs only once, if the sand is never turned over, then what? The weight of that question presses against the ribs, a quiet panic in the marrow. Because if this is all there is, then we have no choice but to face what we are, not as unfinished drafts waiting for another chapter, but as something whole in our incompleteness.
Perhaps fulfillment is not in what stretches beyond us, but in the simple fact of having been. A breath taken, a hand held, a laugh that existed for no other reason than that it could. Perhaps the measure of a life is not in how long it lasts, nor in what follows, but in the way it presses itself into the world, however briefly. A footprint before the tide, a voice that once rang out and then fell silent. We ache for permanence, for continuation, but maybe that was never the point. Maybe we are meant to be transient, a flicker against the vastness, and maybe—just maybe—that is enough.
It is a strange thing, to try to make peace with impermanence. To understand that no matter how much we gather, how much we build, we are all just borrowing time. And yet, what a thing it is to have borrowed it—to have felt the sun on skin, to have tasted salt on lips, to have known longing, laughter, sorrow. To have once been part of the great, impossible motion of existence. If this is all we are given, if the book closes and there is no more, would that make this story any less worth telling?
Maybe that’s it. That’s all there was and will be. And is that such a bad thing?
