I think you should quit

Welcome to Nature's Corrupted, Magen Cubed's newsletter. This is a place to share writing, thoughts, observations, and personal stories at the intersection of art, fiction, and life.

I think you should quit.

I do.

Quit writing the book. Quit drawing and cartooning. Quit painting. Quit designing. There's dignity in quitting while you're ahead. You don't have to keep on keeping on. It hurts too much to keep it up with the news being what it is. The hungry hands around your throat feel tighter all the time. You're tired of struggling to breathe with fingers digging into the thinnest places on your skin. I know you're tired the way I'm tired, down deep into the marrow of your bones where you feel them splinter and crack. I know how it feels to ache with disease.

There's no point in doing the work. That's why you should quit. To spare yourself. To save time. Save heartbreak. It's better to never risk such ugly things. It doesn't matter anyway. What do you have to say? The words turn to ash on your tongue when you speak. They evaporate from the tips of your fingers and become dust. The words belong to someone else, someone who breathes the dust and turns it into gold through alchemical miracles. It makes your lungs hurt to think of the way gold catches sunlight. That's why I think you should quit.

And I do. I think you should quit. I think you should quit now. Right now, not a moment later. The tides are rising as if the moon held out her hand to call them. They swallow the shores to be closer to her face and we watch from broken porches as the water comes home. The house becomes swollen and it shudders and coughs as it takes on water. We hug its walls to tell it sweet stories because we have nowhere else to go and no one else to tell. We sing and the house sings back as the shore disappears.

There are bombs, you know. Bombs that fall like rain from the sky and turn the earth black beneath our feet. There are fires and floods and landslides. Heating oceans and collapsing forests. There is death everywhere you look. You can't stop it with words or pictures. You shouldn't do anything at all but sit and scroll and think, “I am nothing.” Because you are nothing and no one the same way I'm nothing and no one. We are nothing. We are not even atoms but the stuff that dreams of the privilege of being an atom.

That's why you should quit. Now, today. Quit yesterday and tomorrow and forever. Let's lie down in the dirt together and let the earth consume us. The soil will take us back into the roots and the bedrock and we will feed the dying trees. We can stand against the smokestacks and take their poison. There's dignity there.

Maybe that's too cruel to say. Maybe it's a lie. So I'll say it another way so that it goes down more easily. Fewer accusations that way. Hurt feelings. I'll say it the way I hear it when I wake up and when I go to sleep and the hours in between when I can feel my own skin the most.

I think I should quit.

I do.

I think about quitting every day.

Quit writing, quit reading, quit thinking, quit making. I should quit. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't make any money. The earth is poisoned and the sky is black and there are footsteps echoing down the street in the fat heavy slap of boots on asphalt. I am terrified. I am angry. I am nothing but atoms but even less than that. The universe is infinite and I am nothing. I am a fossil yet to form, a ghost yet to realize the heart has stopped. An empty house, a shell, a husk of something that could have been someone but failed.

I am beyond no one, a negative sum that was never born and never lived and will never die because I am always dying. I am dying and you are dying and we are together infinite in our nothingness, a void where our hearts and mouths have been. We are death undying and eternal and trapped within screens that reflect death in mirrors forever and ever, amen, our hands clasped in prayer for forgiveness to the gods we hope are listening.

But I’m not going to quit.

And I hope you don't either.

Because we still have hands to hold one another and mouths to sing songs and words in our throats that need saying even in the dark.

I hope I hear from you.