made to disappear

by Alex Saum

“What does it mean to disappear?” I asked this question to a self-selected group of 44 anonymous participants during the months of February to June 2020.

40.91% of them understood disappearance to mean disintegrating into three short and consecutive dashes and, out of which

– – – or perhaps, in of which – – –

100% selected a single dot to contain the fleeting essence of what they mean by

void. 

Unfortunately, the data revealed some discrepancies about which exact dot

[” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .”]

reflected best the respondents’ sense of disappearing. Alas, here lay the limitations of representing the incommensurable vastness of the universe

using dots.

Faced against the limits of human comprehension, 23 participants believed non-existence to take the shape of a fruit [i.e. a pear].

More significantly, 56.82% of respondents selected “mass graves” as synonym of disappearing, while 43.18% confirmed that there’s hundreds of thousands of

hands and feet buried

under freeways,

damns and

playgrounds in their country. 

I never understood numbers. Thus, I can only confirm that: 

– – – = mass graves.