Things

They were things. Forget “people”, forget “humans”, even the word “animals” was just another noise made with their mouths and a combination of symbols on a page with absolutely no relation other than the merely cognitive to what they really were, to their basic essence. “Things”, while itself as a vocal sound and symbolic depiction was just as irrelevant, at least by its very definition, was so vague and superfluous so as to do justice to that which they were at their most fundamental level. All “sentient beings” in fact, if seen through the eyes of a newly, instantaneously materialised perceiver, would appear as nothing more than totally weird alien things. They had, over the millennia, developed all manner of ways in which to disguise their thingness, not least to those around them but above all, in order to avoid the existential horror such a realisation would provoke, to themselves. Those lesser conscious things, beyond whom the capacity to self-reflect still lay, were without the necessity to hide from themselves their thingness in so much as they weren’t even aware of it to begin with.