While people grieve and despair over the “problems” in their own lives, what has gnawed at me through sleepless nights with dread has been the nature of existence itself.

The universe will not cease to exist one day—rather, it will be purified of matter. Perhaps there will be a heat death, but something will happen nonetheless. The thought of a void containing no biological life forms, a space unexperienced by any consciousness, does not strike me as terrifying—instead, it feels like a cosmic challenge to the limits of the human mind. Questions follow one another: “How could that be possible?” “How long will this continue?” “What will happen later?” “Then why is there something instead of nothing at all?” The terror born of these questions has estranged me from small and ordinary human life. While people grieve and despair over the “problems” in their own lives, what has gnawed at me through sleepless nights with dread has been the nature of existence itself. The only way to make peace with this feeling was to befriend nothingness—to form an alliance that is abstract and metaphysical, one that condemns the concrete and the physical. And by doing so, I abandoned my body and transcended the Earth.