Chapter 1: I Do Not Kill

I do not kill. Not animals. Not even the ones most people swat without a second thought. Years have passed since I crushed a body smaller than mine. I husch the mosquito away, even when it pierces my skin with its hunger. I scoop up the flies that beat themselves frantic against the window, trapped in their panic, and release them into air. I share my shower with the spider clinging to porcelain, its thin legs trembling only because it wants stillness.

I walk careful. My eyes drag down toward the ground as if the earth has more truth than the sky. Ants, cracks, shadows, shapes of leaves, everything beneath me is louder than the voices of people. And the world, God, the world is loud, even when silent.

It’s not that I am saintly. It’s not that I do this for virtue or praise. It’s just that my body rebels against killing. My hands shake with the weight of power, with the knowing that I could end something that only ever wanted to exist. I cannot. I will not.

I live in constant observation. I absorb like a sponge pressed too long against the counter, swollen, dripping. Every sound, every twitch, every shift of air, taken in and carried. I do not know how to filter. I do not know how to move through life without noticing everything. It is exhausting. It is holy. 

The world is enormous and violent and screaming, and I walk through it staring at the ground, trying not to crush even the smallest living thing.

Because if I can spare even one mosquito, one spider, one trembling wing from the weight of my existence, maybe I can spare myself too.

Chapter 2: Catastrophe

All beings live inside their own fragile perception of existence. The ant, minding its tiny errands, has no prophecy of the boot that may flatten its world in the next step. The fly hurls itself against glass, desperate, frantic, praying to reach the outside, never knowing freedom depends on the whim of the giant who owns the walls. The spider builds a home in the corner of a shower, weaving survival into its silk, blind to the fact that this territory is already claimed by a being hundreds of times larger.

We call ourselves human. But to them, we are nature itself. We are hurricanes. We are earthquakes. We are the flood that comes without warning. We are the catastrophe.

And yet, what do we do? We cry when hurricanes take our homes, we curse the skies when fires rage, we grieve when oceans swallow our people. We pray. We fear. We bargain. We shake our fists at something larger, something we cannot control.

But when was the last time you looked down and saw yourself as that force of nature? When was the last time you admitted: to something smaller than me, I am god?

Protector. Or destroyer. Mercy. Or massacre.

That choice lives in your hands every day, and most never see it. They swat. They stomp. They crush. And they call it nothing. Comfort. Cleanliness. Inconvenience removed.

But in the eyes of the ant, the fly, the spider, there is no difference between your hand and a natural disaster. You are the unpredictable force that shapes life and death.

This is the mantra that keeps my mind from breaking: We all live in our own existence.

Maybe God is in all of us. Or maybe we are all just playing god, each in the confined cage of our own perception. Because in the end, the only existence you will ever truly know, the only one that is undeniable, inescapable, and brutally yours, is your own.

Your thoughts. Your feelings. Your reactions. Your actions. Your outcomes.

Each thread weaving a private universe, stitching your reality together until you believe it’s the whole truth. But it isn’t. It’s only one truth. Yours.

And just like the spider in the corner, someone else may be praying to survive inside it.

Chapter 3: If You Know Me

If you know me, you know I never believed in God.

I sought. I studied. I searched through pages, prayers, and philosophies. But I couldn’t reconcile the abandonment I felt, not from people, not from family, but from something deeper. A weight that pressed on spirit, not flesh. The sickness, the grief, the outcomes no hands of mine could change, these weren’t lessons, they were lashes.

We seek. We punish. We believe. We run. And yet, pain always lingers at the core.

Pain asks questions. And questions are not gentle. They come sharp, they come restless, they come like teeth in the dark. They poison the light in your eyes, the light that once carried hope for a better tomorrow.

The why becomes a shadow. The shadow becomes a story. And the story becomes a prison.

Stories from the past, carried into every tomorrow, do not heal you. They chain you. They are not letting go, they are holding on. They are not forgiveness, they are vengeance disguised. They are not resilience, they are repetition.

Telling the same story of hurt over and over does not mean you overcame it. It means you are still living inside it, replaying the same script, hoping the ending will finally change. But it won’t.

True strength is not repeating the story. True strength is forgetting, not in the sense that it never happened, but in the sense that its claws no longer own you. That its weight no longer bends your spine.

The power is not in the motives of the hurt. The power is in the gratitude for who you became in spite of it.

And now, let’s circle back. If you know me, you know I don’t believe in God. Not the painted God. Not the one sculpted by human hands, dressed in robes, confined to temples, wielded as both sword and shield. For years, I couldn’t find the who or the why.

But I do believe. I believe in what comes through me when the world is too heavy to carry. I believe in the words I write that feel older than me, truer than me. I believe in the voice that whispers not from above, but from within.

If you know me, you know I don’t believe in God. And if you really know me, you know that I do.

xoxo Vie