After The Story Fails by Charles Paul Jones
Chapter One: The Silence Between Systems
From the ruins of obedience and the echo of laughter, something waits.
There’s a moment, after the gears stop grinding and the shepherd loses interest, when you expect something to happen.
Maybe a choir. Maybe revelation. Maybe you finally get the text from God, marked urgent, unread until now.
But mostly—there’s nothing.
Just… air.
Stillness.
The sound of your own nervous system humming in a frequency you forgot how to hear.
This is the moment after the story fails.
Not the fairy tale. Not the propaganda poster. Not even the comforting lie you whispered to yourself on the nights the rent was late and the mirror was unkind. I mean the story—the deep one. The one that made the rest of it tolerable. The one that told you who you were, why the world worked the way it did, and what you were supposed to do about it.
That story.
The spine of your so-called self.
Gone.
What’s left isn’t chaos. Not yet. It’s weirder.
It’s structure without meaning.
A grocery store still stocked with plastic fruit. A marriage still scheduled on Google Calendar, even though no one comes home anymore. A nation still voting on who gets to steer the sinking ship into shallower waters.
When the myth fails, it doesn’t vanish.
It lingers.
Decaying.
A ghost made of policy briefings, push notifications, and branding decks.
And you—well, you’re still here, aren’t you?
Breathing.
Watching.
Trying to decide if you should sign back in.
Trying to remember if there’s another password.
Another program.
Another god.
But what if the next story isn’t waiting?
What if it’s not supposed to be replaced?
What if this moment—this exposure—isn’t a glitch in your narrative arc?
What if it’s the point?
What if silence isn’t the absence of truth…
but its precondition?
I have no parables left.
Only patterns.
Only breath.
Only the things that remain when the narration dies.
This is one of them.