There’s something unknown in the human condition, something that craves the dark and unknown and disgusting and beautiful, that knows disgust and beauty are one and the same—the same feeling, different manifestations of it—coming across something you cannot fully understand. The brightest shimmering red sunset, the brightest-red gore of a half-eaten carcass—one in the same, humanity, the beginning, the end. The strange things that cannot be explained are the things that make our bones ache for a longing to understand, an eternal yearn for the esoteric secrets of the past and the present and the future, around all of us like a thin, transparent veil, which we can only feel when we’re close to passing through it. Sometimes, a gentle breeze will blow the not-lace into our faces, and we’ll swipe at the sudden itch, thinking it a mosquito or some similar unenlightened being hated by christ, when in fact it’s the key to everything. Moth to flame, fly to corpse. The draw for life and death is an illusion. It’s all one. As are we. You are me and I am you and thus the world is what the world is not and back again, and the veil is lifted in those brief seconds of understanding—that is, the time before sleep and before wake, before dreams and before death, when there is nothing and everything, and it is understood that they are one. But! How can we ever really know? The truth is that you realize this every day, every moment, just in a place that isn’t your own mind—follow the decomposing wooden door at the back of your head to some chain-linked backyard, overgrown with weeds and filthy with black dirt. Perhaps there’s a dog there, sitting blindly, his eyes milky with age and seeing too much in all his dog-years, and his dog face is laughing, because he understands. This we yearn for and this we cannot get. The truest soul-things are the ones we cannot fully explain, things that speak to something greater, the energy thrumming and howling around us, the wish to be more, the fear of being more, the envy of unaware beings.