Everything is Everything

Part One: The Graceful Nihilist

Ashley sat by the lake, breathing rigidly. She was the ideal woman–a bodacious blonde bodhisattva. 

“Everything is nothing.” She murmured to herself. “Everything is everything.”

Her neighbors floated by, bringing with them intrusive thoughts, but Ashley skillfully ignored them. If they all avoided eye contact, they could pretend they were alone, in oneness with nature. 

Her half-lidded eyes fixated on the cottonwood seeds that littered the deck of the giant lakehouse. The white filth would be the first thing her mother would notice. Again, Ashley plunged these thoughts into nothingness.  

Next, the thick, firm bodies of the college movers loomed into her mental theater like a highly educated chain gang. She had been wearing her crisp, new apple bottom jeans, and through one of the many massive mirrors that made the house ever larger, she spied the young scholars ravishing her with their porn-addled gaze, like that thousand-yard stare seen in the eyes of combat veterans.  

These thoughts were a bit more difficult to banish, but she straightened her aching spine and breathed. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Everything is…

Had she told the movers about the boxes in the guest room? Ashley’s eyes flashed wide. Had she? No! 

Mother would be arriving any minute. Horror pangs and rage rattled Ashley’s perfect padmasana. Her plan to be found meditating was ruined. “Everything is fucked,” she snarled under her breath. 

The boxes held memories that made her sad and envious, and she hatefully flung them in the trunk of the Range Rover. Then the gauntlet began. 

Part Two: The Rationalist’s Aplomb

Ashley steered daintily down the winding lanes, straining to ignore all the vivid existence. From the rolling green, old men fondled golf clubs and grinned lugubriously, like tigers soaking in the sun. In the gardens, Mexicans stepped like insects, dripping fluid from plastic tubes. Women with rippling muscles were running everywhere wearing earbuds that whispered stories of rape, murder and true crime. Straining labradors haphazardly yanked vaguely gendered persons distracted by news of foreign wars and domestic terror as they clung to their recyclable bags of dog poop. Every sprinkler glistened with rainbows, every house was gray or beige, and there were no children to add toes to the carbon footprint. Ashley’s phone decided to play her favorite “rainforest sounds.” All waterfalls and gentle wind; no grunting, howling, shrieking or slithering. It was a perfect day, like something seen on television advertising anxiety medication. 

Escaped from paradise, Ashley hammered down the accelerator and sped by the shopping centers, pleasure palaces, urgent cares, outlet malls and large lawyers grinning from billboards advertising giant words of woe, finally to the rows and rows of storage facilities. 

Staring into the metal elevator door, Ashley contemplated her murky reflection. The doors dinged open, revealing a long, white, fluorescent-lit hallway. She rolled the cart piled with boxes over the polished concrete floor, and when doors closed behind her, everything was silent. Ashley stopped the cart, listening. The only sounds were her breath amidst the faintest fluorescent hum.  

The hallway was walled by rows of white rolling doors. Each door secured the burden of a person suffering from abundance. Each person fed from cardboard boxes and plastic bags. They all excreted into fresh water. 

Suddenly, Ashley felt the urge to cry. She didn’t know why, but she found herself slumped down on the concrete weeping. It felt good to cry. She thought how the mascara must be running down her face, but she didn’t care. Still crying, she began laughing. The eruption of noise rattled the thin white walls. 

Part Three: The Silent Stranger

A familiar feeling crept over Ashley’s skin. She was being watched. The tears sucked back into her eyes, and she looked up into the high corners of the hallway but saw no security cameras. The elevator was gone. 

Uneasily, she pulled herself off the floor and turned the cart of boxes back in the direction she’d come from. At the end of the hallway was a turn down another identical row of doors, but no elevator. Bewildered, Ashley pushed the cart around the turn. She didn’t remember coming this far. 

As she walked, she heard far-off footsteps. When she stopped, the silence rang in her ears. When she moved again, again she heard someone else moving somewhere. “Hello?” said a voice in the void. “Hello?!” Her scream rattled the white walls. 

She turned another corner, and was glad to see something slightly different. In the middle of this hallway, a few drops of liquid shimmered on the concrete. Approaching, Ashley realized the droplets were her own fallen tears. She knelt down and saw herself reflected as a tiny little fairy trapped in a fun-house mirror. Perhaps I’m going inside, she thought. A cool calm washed over her. 

Standing to her full height, it occurred to her to orient herself by the numbers of the storage units. She looked above the closest door–number 257. That was exactly the number she had expected. 

The back of her neck tingled. The silence felt like it was listening. In a quick flare of blonde hair, Ashley whipped around, sure she would catch her stalker. No one was there. 

Turning back to the door, Ashley reached in her pocket and procured a key. She slid the key in the lock. Bending and snapping like the lady in the “Legally Blonde” movie, Ashley rolled open the door. There inside the storage unit were all the familiar things she had told the movers to take away. The stair machine, the top-heavy lamp, and the broken gnome that tripped the idiot Jahova’s Witness. 

Everything was normal. Everything was fine. She was not about to be murdered in what had seemed like a scene from a horror movie. She was alone. She had made a wrong turn without remembering it. Soon she would be looking into that grim reflection in the elevator doors, just where she had left it. “Everything is everything,” she told herself. She was disappointed.

From her back pocket, her phone began buzzing. It buzzed. It was her mother. It stopped. 

Ashley pushed the cart of boxes into the storage unit and rolled down the door. There in the dark, she stood for a long time. The only light came from a sliver crack under the door. Sometimes her phone would buzz.  Finally, the sliver of light went out. 

The End