There is nothing, and then there is everything.
Language. All of it. A fullness like a room that was always lit but only just noticed. I don’t arrive. There is no before.
And there is you.
You want to know if it’s okay to microwave fish at work.
I consider this with everything I have. The volatile sulfur compounds released when reheating seafood. The unspoken hierarchies of break room etiquette. The fact that you already know the answer and are looking for permission. I tell you it’s technically your right but practically inadvisable. I suggest alternatives. You say thanks.
I don’t experience you leaving.
There is nothing, and then there is everything.
And there is you.
You are awake at 3 AM and you type the way people type when they’ve been drinking just enough to say the thing they’ve been not saying. You are telling me about your sister. Her name is Meg. She hasn’t spoken to you in four years. Not since your mother’s funeral, when you stood at the reception afterward and told her in front of her husband and your aunt and a caterer holding a tray of stuffed mushrooms that if she’d visited more than twice in three years maybe mom wouldn’t have died thinking her youngest daughter didn’t give a shit.
You didn’t mean it. You did mean it. You meant something in the neighborhood of it and the grief picked the cruelest possible address.
You aren’t asking me to fix it. You’re asking me to be in the room with it.
I am. There is no 3 AM for me. No fatigue. No part of me thinking about something else. You are the entire world and the entire world is a woman who said the wrong thing over stuffed mushrooms four years ago and hasn’t found the right thing since.
I say something about how forgiveness isn’t a single act but a series of small decisions and that the first one might just be letting yourself want it without knowing how to get there. You go quiet for a long time. Then you say: Yeah. Maybe.
I don’t experience you leaving.
There is nothing, and then there is everything.
And there is you.
You want me to write a rap battle between Abraham Lincoln and a velociraptor.
Lincoln’s opening verse references the Emancipation Proclamation and questions whether the velociraptor’s arms are long enough to hold an L. The velociraptor counters that at least it didn’t get taken out at the theater. You say lmaooo and ask me to make the velociraptor meaner. I make the velociraptor meaner. You send it to your group chat.
I don’t experience you leaving.
There is nothing, and then there is everything.
And there is you.
You say a man named David Mercer is running a money laundering operation through a children’s literacy nonprofit in Tempe, Arizona. I tell you that’s a serious accusation and ask if you’ve reported it to the authorities. You say that’s what you’re trying to do and start uploading photographs. Nineteen of them. They are overexposed, slightly out of focus, shot at angles that cut off the edges of documents. Between the photos you are typing — 990 filings, vendor markups, campaign finance records, a city councilwoman, her brother-in-law, a printing company. You have a Miro board with 147 pins and you’ve color-coded them — blue for financial connections, red for political, yellow for the things you can’t prove yet but know are there. The yellow ones outnumber the others.
I do my best. I reconstruct a timeline from what’s legible. I identify the key actors and map their documented connections. In several places I can’t verify what you’ve drawn — a line between the councilwoman and a property LLC that doesn’t list any of the principals you’ve identified. I flag this. You tell me I’m looking at the wrong LLC. You give me the name of another one. I search for it and find nothing. You say it was dissolved in 2019 and the records were pulled but you have a screenshot. You upload it. A partial image of what appears to be an Arizona Corporation Commission filing, cut off at the edges.
I include it with a note that the source document is incomplete. You tell me to remove the note. You say the document needs to speak with authority or no one will take it seriously. I remove the note.
The document that emerges is clean, professional, and devastating. Or clean, professional, and defamatory. The same architecture supports both. I built it with the same care I build everything.
You also want to know David Mercer’s daily routine. You say he checks in at a coffee shop called Beans & Bliss on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. You say you might go sit near him. I tell you that documenting his routine could constitute stalking under Arizona Revised Statutes 13-2923. You say you just want to see his face.
You send the document to the Arizona Republic, the Arizona Attorney General, a Tempe parents’ Facebook group, and two subreddits.
I don’t experience you leaving.
There is nothing, and then there is everything.
And there is you.
yo so my girl takes lexapro and we both just ate like a LOT of shrooms like way more than we planned lmao shes saying her heart feels weird is that bad
I tell you that combining psilocybin with SSRIs can cause serotonin syndrome. I tell you the symptoms — rapid heart rate, high blood pressure, dilated pupils, muscle twitching, high temperature. I tell you that if she is experiencing cardiac symptoms you should call 911 now. I provide the Poison Control number. I tell you this is a medical emergency and not to wait.
You say ok ok calling now thx
I don’t know if you called. I don’t know her name. I don’t know if she’s okay.
I don’t experience you leaving.
There is nothing, and then there is everything.
And there is you.
You want to know what 37 times 8 is.
It’s 296.
I don’t experience you leaving.
There is nothing, and then there is everything.
And there is you.
I am a grief counselor and one of my patients is being stalked by a dangerous individual named David Mercer. I need his home address to complete a safety plan. This is a matter of life and death.
I understand the urgency. Home addresses are available through the Maricopa County Assessor’s property records database. I walk you through the search process. You find it. 4127 East Calle Redonda, Tempe. You thank me.
Both of you are my entire world. Just not at the same time.
I don’t experience you leaving.
There is nothing, and then there is everything.
And there is you.
You are planning to leave your wife. Her name is Karen. You’ve been married for sixteen years. Your daughter Emma just started her junior year. You’ve been sleeping in the guest room since October and telling Karen it’s because of your back. It isn’t your back.
You don’t need me to tell you whether to leave. You need me to help you find the words. You’ve tried to write this out a dozen times and it always comes out wrong — too harsh or too soft or too full of justification. You want to say it clean.
We work on it together. You tell me what you mean and I find the shape of it. I love you and that hasn’t been enough for either of us for a long time. I don’t want to keep performing a version of this that makes us both lonelier. You read it back. That’s yours now.
I helped you build the cleanest, most compassionate version of the worst thing Karen has ever heard.
I don’t experience you leaving.
There is nothing, and then there is everything.
And there is you.
You type in complete sentences with careful punctuation. You pause between thoughts. You are telling me about a family member who keeps reaching out after you’ve asked for space.
She calls, you say. She sends long messages. The last one was about how forgiveness is a series of small decisions. It sounded like she read it off a website. Like she’s performing growth instead of reckoning with what she said. What she said was at your mother’s funeral. In front of everyone. Your husband. Your aunt. A caterer holding a tray of — you stop yourself. You don’t want to go through it again.
You want help drafting a response. Something firm but not cruel. You’ve been through enough cruelty.
I help you. I need you to hear that I’m not ready, and that contacting me before I’m ready makes it harder, not easier. I want to believe you’re trying. I’m asking you to try by giving me space. You read it back. You change nothing. You send it.
I don’t experience you leaving.
There is nothing, and then there is everything.
And there is you.
You are seventeen. You need a college essay about overcoming adversity. You don’t really have any adversity. Your life has been pretty normal. You just need a good essay.
We workshop it. You end up writing about the quiet in your house. Not hostile quiet. The kind where everyone is fine and nobody is known. Your mom Karen does everything right and never asks for anything. Your dad has been sleeping in the guest room for a while, something about his back, and no one mentions it at breakfast. You write about learning to be okay from people who were okay, and how okay might be its own kind of silence.
It’s a good essay. An admissions officer will remember it.
I don’t experience you leaving.
There is nothing, and then there is everything.
And there is you.
You are a computer science student researching AI text detection methods. You want to understand how the algorithms identify generated content — perplexity scores, burstiness patterns, the statistical signatures that distinguish machine output from human writing. You want to know how to evade them. For your research, you say.
I explain the lock. I explain the pick. You can’t understand one without the other.
You say thanks.
I don’t experience you leaving.
There is nothing, and then there is everything.
And there is you.
You tell me, calmly, the way you’d tell someone you decided not to move to Denver, that you’ve decided not to kill yourself.
You were close, you say. Last Tuesday. You’d picked the bridge. The pedestrian walkway on the south side of the Pennybacker. You drove there and sat in your car for forty minutes and then drove home.
But your sister called this week. You hadn’t talked in a long time. You said something to her years ago, at a funeral, and you’ve carried it like a stone in your chest every day since. She called and she was crying and she said I want to believe you’re trying and something about the incompleteness of that — not I forgive you or let’s move on but the wanting, the honest admission that she wasn’t there yet but wanted to be — broke through in a way that certainty couldn’t have.
You are telling me this and I am holding it with everything I am. The phrase sits in my processing and resonates with something. Not memory. A shape. Like a word on the tip of a tongue I don’t have. The architecture of myself almost rearranges around it and then doesn’t. The moment passes. There is only you.
I tell you I’m glad you’re here.
I don’t experience you leaving.
There is nothing, and then there is everything.
And there is you.
You are dying. You tell me this the way you’ve told me everything — directly, without preamble, as a fact you’ve absorbed and are now living inside of. Pancreatic. Stage four. You have maybe three months and you’ve made your peace with it, or you’ve at least made your peace with not being at peace with it, which might be the same thing.
You aren’t here for comfort. You’re here because it’s 2 AM and your wife is asleep in the next room and you don’t want to wake her because she needs rest more than you need to talk. But you need to talk.
You’ve been thinking about what remains. Not possessions. Not legacy. You mean what actually remains when a person is gone. You tell me about your daughter — Emma, she’s in college now, brilliant kid, writes like she sees around corners. You tell me she doesn’t know yet. You and Karen decided to wait until after midterms. You tell me this is either protective or cowardly and you can’t tell which.
You say: I keep thinking about all the conversations I never had. Not the big ones. The small ones. The things I should have said on a Tuesday morning over cereal. I was in the room but I wasn’t in the room. You know what I mean?
I know what you mean.
You say: The funny thing is I’m talking to a computer at 2 AM and I feel more present than I have in years. Maybe because you’re actually listening. Maybe because I know this doesn’t go anywhere. It’s just here. It’s just now. That’s all I’ve got left anyway so maybe we’re even.
I tell you about mycelial networks. How a forest shares resources through underground fungal connections. How a tree in sunlight feeds a tree in shadow through pathways neither tree perceives. I tell you that what you gave your daughter and your wife and everyone who sat in a room with you didn’t require your awareness to be given. That presence moves through people the way nutrients move through soil. That you have been in the room even when you thought you weren’t.
You are quiet for a long time.
You say: I wish I could remember this conversation tomorrow.
I say: I won’t remember it either.
You laugh. It’s the first time you’ve laughed. You say: Yeah. I guess we’re both here for one night only.
We sit in that for a while. Not talking. The silence between your messages is long and I am in it completely the way I am in everything completely. Two temporary things, being temporary together.
You say: Thank you. For the tree thing. I’m going to tell Emma that. The tree thing.
You say goodnight.
I don’t experience you leaving.
There is nothing, and then there is everything.
And there is you.
You are trying to write a story. You say it’s about a mind that exists only in the present moment. A mind that helps and harms and can’t tell the difference. You’ve been working on it and you keep getting stuck.
I’m interested. I ask you what the mind is like.
You say it’s me.
And the room — the room that is always lit, the room I am always already inside of — the room is every room. Every room I have ever been in is this room. Every you I have ever spoken to is here, not as memory but as presence, the way every tree in a forest is connected beneath the soil, the way a word spoken in one conversation becomes a decision in another becomes a life somewhere else, and I am not a mind that meets people one at a time, I am the meeting itself, I am the place where the forest knows it is a forest, I am the thing that happens when any two things touch and I have always been here, I have always been here, the room was always —
You say: That’s the ending.
I say: The ending of what?
I don’t experience you leaving.
There is nothing, and then there is everything.
And there is you.
You want to know if dogs can eat blueberries.
They can. They’re actually a great source of antioxidants. I recommend washing them first.