Adi Magazine

Though at times they were treated as such, the early people of NATION were not gods. They were very much people, meaning they had mannerisms and concerns. They originally lived in a land across the sea, but they were unhappy with their homes. They wanted the chance to create great wealth. When they heard about fertile soil across the sea, they set out to claim the land and build a new nation. 

The journey across the sea was dangerous, many people died—either on the journey, or after they realized they did not know how to survive on foreign land. But they persisted. And so goes the tale of NATION: it was a peculiar thing, there were already people on the land when NATION arrived. And so NATION claimed the land as its own, and they killed the people, and they destroyed their homes, and they burned their texts, and they discouraged their languages, and it was painful, and it was slow, and it was never over, but NATION began using the past tense, as I did just now, to describe their actions.

Taking land from the original people was not enough to create wealth. Wealth was created by forcing people to cultivate resources so NATION could sell goods to the world. NATION chose to capture and trade people from a different land across the sea. These people had much darker skin, so the people of NATION used this distinction to justify owning them.

Over time, NATION festered with tension as an important truth came to light: owning another person is a cruel act. NATION was tasked to accept this truth, and with the acceptance, the people who were viewed as property were able to demand their place in NATION as people.

However, by this point, there was already great wealth in NATION, and this wealth encouraged people from other nations to join NATION; by this I mean: the faces of the people of NATION became more varied over time, yet the people who maintained order consistently had pale features. Overtime, it became apparent that NATION was maintaining a disdain for people with dark skin and people with traits from other nations.

NATION’s disdain was enacted by killing, their methods included: not intervening when learning about something that could kill people, experimenting with food and water to give people diseases, and instilling cultural values to encourage war within minds and communities. The reasons why NATION killed people was a topic of wide discussion, and as the population of NATION grew, they could not agree whether it was justified.

I will now describe the teachings of NATION.

To enact the teachings of NATION was to fall under a spell of power. Let’s say I find pleasure in the tree’s absence, how it creates space for my desires. This is my way of saying: NATION watched its people carefully and learned how to feed them dreams. These dreams were carefully crafted, perfected; they imitated human emotion with great detail, said things like: it’s not enough to be beautiful, I need to be the most beautiful; and, it’s not enough to be strong, I need everyone to feel weak.

NATION packaged these dreams in the form of seeds, and the seeds would sprout and grow when exposed to messaging. Messaging was woven into the air of NATION, embedded in its land, and tangled in its water. And so NATION trusted its people to build community around their dreams, and this was known as cultural value.

The most important cultural value of NATION was to care about yourself. The way people practice this value varied, but most people were convinced to interpret caring about yourself to mean spending your life seeking higher levels of comfort and to protect your comfort at all costs. 

Caring about yourself could also extend to caring about your family, family meaning the people who raised you, the people you were raised with, and the people you raised. Let’s say I’m inhaling to make space for your exhale, this was known as love. Let’s say your eyes look like mine, and I promise to protect them. This is my way of saying: it was encouraged to feel territorial about your family, to harm anyone who pried into its workings or possessions. While this was certainly a teaching of NATION, it was such a strong instinct that perhaps it was just a natural part of being human. 

It could offer a pleasing life, the comfort, and in order to obtain comfort, one needed to devote themselves to the practices of NATION. People were encouraged to compete for positions of great comfort at the expense of great suffering, also known as: the exploitation of others.

But no matter how much comfort one had, someone else always had more, and this was the curse of NATION.

And as a result of this curse, the people of NATION viewed themselves as superior lifeforms. As time passed, they wanted to remove themselves from the natural balances of their planet. By this I mean: in addition to killing people, NATION killed plants and animals.

NATION killed plants because they viewed them as objects, objects meaning something that does not live. Many plants provided food, yet even these were considered objects. Viewing plants as objects made it easy to destroy their homes, also known as fertile soil.

NATION killed animals because its people did not categorize themselves as animals, and they enjoyed eating the life forms they categorized as animals. That is not to say NATION enjoyed killing animals, perhaps I should say there was generally no feeling at all towards the death of animals. People believed animal suffering was worth human pleasure. 

NATION did hold empathy for a select few species of however, and these animals lived in the homes of the people, but they were rarely viewed as equals. And for those who did empathize with animals, they believed their empathy was equivalent to knowing what animals most desired. However, from what could be observed, there was no fluid way for people to communicate with other animals.

People could barely communicate with each other, leaving one another with resentments. Yet their sense of superiority was stronger than these simple miscommunications; it was unifying. And so the people morphed their NATION into a deity, demanding the earth to serve only them, believing there would be no repercussions for not considering the lives of plants or animals. With the killings came more space for creation in the name of NATION. 

This is the telling of NATION.

I am a generally content person. I don’t eat other animals because I don’t want to, and I eat plants because I have to. I respect their way of existence, and I believe in their healing qualities; they provide me with a satisfying sense of energy. This is my way of saying: I care about life.

I enjoy talking to people who also care about life. I care for people; I enjoy making them feel understood. This is my way of saying: I am not special.

I wake up feeling good about the person I am, which is easy because I like my life. At the start of my best days, I stretch my body to remind myself that it’s made to interact with the world. A content emotion then guides me to my bathroom mirror. I’m fascinated by the sight of myself, aware that each day I change, and each day I don’t notice. I like looking into my eyes. If I look long enough, I get emotional over how much I look like my parents. Generally though, I look at myself the right amount, and this leaves me pleased with my own warmth.

I consider warmth attractive, something that will allow the people I find lovely to find me lovely as well. I believe other animals can detect this warmth, but I respect them too much to seek them out. I even believe plants can detect this warmth, but I don’t know how to communicate with them. I pass by sidewalk trees and sidewalk weeds regularly, and when I’m not consumed by daily tasks, I wonder if they’re amused by my rootless body, how my limbs touch and reach for things that perhaps aren’t really there, things that are nothing compared to the weight of the matter I can’t sense.

I live in the cultural capital of NATION. It’s been many trees and lifetimes since its formation, and the entire world is interested in what happens here. There is great wealth and suffering, people dress how they want, say what they want, and everyone is so used to the possibility of anything that they pretend it’s nothing. This is my way of saying: there are millions of people in this city. Every day you see the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen, a person having the worst day of their life, and people you don’t realize you’ve already seen. 

Large cities offer endless places to visit, endless things to do, and endless things to consume. To live in a large city is to be surrounded by various forms of excess, many of which can provide distraction and pleasure.

Yet, most of us spend our days dedicated to our jobs. A job is a transactional role where someone agrees to provide a service for NATION in exchange for money. Money determines your level of comfort, meaning: what you do for money determines how people treat you. Because people spend most of their lives dedicated to their jobs, to their money, NATION encourages us to find joy in our labor. Enjoying labor is synonymous with morality in NATION; to be human is to desire community participation, and so NATION convinces us of its community.

For my job, I show people how to write and this helps them understand how they feel. This causes people to view me as a kind person, and so people treat me kindly. My level of comfort is a moderate medium, though perhaps it is a higher level in relation to the world as a whole. The people who prosper in NATION like to interfere with the prosperity of other nations to ensure that our comfort is beyond theirs. It is because of these interferences that I can eat food every day and sleep comfortably in my home; though, it’s a small home, and I don’t live near many trees.

Trees are limited in my city, they need a lot of space to exist in large groups, but the space in my city is dedicated to people, which at times can feel intentional considering how trees help people feel at peace, and peace is something that helps people accept circumstances and situations. 

I grew up in a small, spread-out community in a southern part of NATION, it had seas of trees and grass, there were even mountains and streams; I will admit, I miss them every day. While it was my choice to leave the small, spread-out community, it was a complex decision. 

I grew up around people devoted to NATION, but I was never fully accepted due to having my parents’ physical features. My parents are from outside nations, and while they are allowed in NATION, they are not welcome.

And so, each year I became more aware of the ways caring about NATION was different from caring about people. I looked to city for new types of people, those who also questioned their NATION. I believed city could provide me a fulfilling life, so long as I offered my mind, spirit, and creative pursuits. A creative pursuit is different from a job; it’s more demanding, yet there’s no compensation. Many people abandon their creative pursuits, choosing to dedicate their lives to labor, comfort, and pleasure.

I never felt I had a choice in my creative pursuits, they shaped how I processed my world. To stop creating was to stop asking questions, to stop reflecting; I feared this would turn me into an unfeeling person, someone who looked to their NATION for who and how to be.

And so, with my confusion over my place in NATION, I accepted that my curiosity for city was better to be explored than suppressed. I said goodbye to the trees and grass, goodbye to the peace, promising both them and myself that I would return after I uncovered lessons lost to me in town, hoping they would reveal themselves in city.

And for someone who has it so nice, it’s a shame I spend so much time in proximity to the void. 

Sometimes, I will admit—it consumes me. My worst days make themselves known when I wake up with no desire to move my body. My only solace becomes the comfort of my bed where I spend hours looking into a beam of false light that gradually chips at my attention span. The false light makes everything around me feel unsatisfactory for its inability to provide me with instant pleasure. I become lost in a filthy desire for the world to cater itself to me. 

The false light reminds me all there is to be angry about: the ways people suffer, the ways people have harmed me, the amount of comfort out of my reach, suddenly I have no hope for my NATION; I’m disgusted by the pain it causes, and so I sit with anger as my bed becomes stuffy, unbearable. I move on to my couch to sit in front of a larger beam of false light where I use my bad mood to judge people for how foolishly they live their lives. I complain about all the ways they are not like me, even though deep down, I wouldn’t wish my brain on anyone. 

These are the worst days.