You tell yourself your whole life that there’s no meaning, that it’s all chaos, that all there is is movement, and you move on. Then when chaos comes, you realize that chaos is just a word. A myth you constructed to avoid confronting all that’s wrong with the world. Chaos became god. And when chaos occurs you’re stuck with the absolute incomprehensibility of it all. Your god is gone. What filled the void of chaos’s chasm, the four letters saving you from harm, was what chaos really was.

You tell yourself again that you understand chaos now. That you can’t understand chaos, but even this chaos uproots from us. The bounds of the human skull, universal speck of skull, the skull itself just flesh and bone, cannot contain what we can never know. You try anyway. You try to know everything. The tower you build higher and higher, using cornerstones of what your I tells you is reality, what you’ve been forced to experience, the small pleasures and wistful flitters, that definition you used to know the unknowable. Tonnes of knowledge, distortions, deduced lies, fact, steel, copper, tin, asbestos, plywood, electricity arcing and flashing lightning, unseen, balancing on four letters and paradigms that only you may or might see.

Scraping skies now but the tower needs fixing. Pulling apart the rotting floors, the young spores of deadly mold, the fresh scent that drew you in. The wind pierces the voids where the Thesian building was adapting, or rather: adapted—passively. The swarm shifts around the base of the building perimeter and by changing, you’re newly aware of chaos again, that cornerstone of myth swiftly crumbling.

Pisanically the tower confronts the direction of chaos’s leaving. Nonpisanically comes teetering. Debris tore canvas overhangs and bore caverns into surrounding architecture. Spelunking through floors and suites, terraforming the artifice. A return to beginnings. A return to eternity. A return to nothing.

Even when you understand chaos it sinks new teeth you didn’t know existed, because chaos lives in every speck of this environmental prison. It simmers and sits, waiting for you to forget that you’ll never understand it. That it is everything it isn’t and is the way it is in ways that thwart what you’ve envisioned. And you pick up the shambles and spit in its face, saying “**** the world, **** the wind, **** chaos, **** existence. Just let me live.”

And it does, lying in wait to strike again. Waiting to force you out of your calm. And that silence should leave you haunted. When the chaos isn’t yours, chaos you become.