WHAT YOU’RE BUILT TO BE COMFORTABLE WITH
by ALEX ROST

November 15 2024

I’d been back too long, doing all the things I used to do and living with a girl who’d spent the past year in the psyche ward for killing her family cat and trying to kill the dog.

She floated through this free fall, enamored with the mistakes she’d made, said, “God gives every person a little piece of His soul, so each person’s soul is already God’s, just this one grand soul, but God gets addicted to giving himself away then feels empty and wants some of it back. Eventually God’s going to feel empty all the time and call back most of His soul, and that’s what the apocalypse is all about. No big deal, nothing to get worked up over, really. We’re all pieces of one, so it doesn’t matter.”

I told her I believed in chaos, that something completely changed my mind once but I forgot what it was so now I was back on chaos.

“Chaos is nice,” I said, “because when things don’t work out you always have an excuse.”

There was a smirk on her face but I smelled sorrow, closed my eyes and saw everything soaked in fatal finality, everything blanketed by nothing.



Alex runs a commercial printing press outside of Buffalo, NY.

@arost154