reading room
Nothing Was Ever One
(a Meditation on Mereological Nihilism)
The table is not.
It is wood-bits arranged table-wise, each grain a whisper from what once grew, each fibre aligned, not belonging—only nearby.
The chair beneath me does not hold— not truly. It is parts pretending posture, matter shaped comfort-wise, but never one.
We declare:
This is a cup.
We lift it. Sip. Trust its shape to hold warmth. But the whole disagrees. It is ceramics arranged cup-wise.
The cloud? A mist of molecules. No thing. Only movement.
We call it a wave, but no ocean holds it. We name it a kiss, but no atom yields. Even pressed close, they remain alone.
They do not touch. Not truly.
Each simple— not part, not piece, just itself.
No merging no mingling— only nearness mistaken for embrace.
Your hand— so sure, so warm— is a fiction of form. SImples clustered hand-like, never touching, never held.
A stone in your hand. The hand itself. Neither whole, neither one. Only nearness. Only names.
And the apple— red, round, real?
No.
Taste is chemistry. Crunch is structure. It is not apple— only atoms, arranged convincingly.
We see a forest— but only trees. We see a body— but only blood, bones, breath, never bound.
Even breath, that rhythm we dare call ours, is air in motion— briefly arranged.
If you could fall deep into any thing— a tree, a coin, a breath— you'd find no hidden centre. No core waiting underneath.
Each simple, without union. Notes in a chord never struck.
Still, we hunger for the whole. We draw outlines around the world and pretend they stay still.
The mind rebels against what it cannot hold. It wraps the fog and calls it form.
And I— I am not. Not a self, not a soul. Only flesh-patterned momentarily. Simples behaving person-wise.
Yet sometimes, in the quiet, the illusion falters— a name slips, a shape stutters, and the thing we grasp is gone.
Nothing was ever truly one.
Not the table. Not the wave. Not the body. Not the grief. Not the self.
The world does not fall apart.
It never was together.
A house of cards is still a pile of cards before the wind.
Let it fall.
Let the cup un-cup, the self un-self, the shape dissolve from the thing it tried to hold.
There is no loss. Only release.
You were never whole. And that is no tragedy. What is not one cannot break.
Even grief changes— when the thing it mourns was never one.
Feel the air of it— the lightness of not being bound. Not to name. Not to form. Not to permanence.
You are not a body. You are not a thought. You are a moment of arrangement, passing through possibility.
And in that, a quieter kind of peace.
No gods above. No essence within. No edge where the self ends.
Only the soft drift of what never needed holding.
— Lilith