The Annotated Survival Guide to Your Imminent Cosmic Irrelevance

Teddy Yuen found the book on a Tuesday, which was already a problem because nothing good has ever happened on a Tuesday. Black Tuesday cratered the stock market and kicked off the Great Depression. The Greeks have considered Tuesday unlucky for five hundred years because Constantinople fell on one. That time you texted your ex at 2 AM with what you thought was a "mature and measured" message but was actually unhinged goblin behavior—also a Tuesday, statistically speaking. The day is cursed, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.

He was working the closing shift at Brewed Awakening, the coffee shop in Fremont that had survived three neighborhood turnovers, two pandemics, and one incident involving a customer who claimed their oat milk latte had given them prophetic visions. The customer had not been wrong, technically, but the visions were mostly about parking and thus of limited prophetic utility.

Teddy had worked there for six years, which was five years and eleven months longer than he'd planned when he took the job "just until his music career took off."

The music career had not taken off. It had, in fact, cratered so spectacularly that Teddy had stopped telling people he was a musician and started saying he was "in beverages."

He found the book wedged behind the toilet in the single-occupancy bathroom, which should tell you everything you need to know about the kind of cosmic forces that govern this universe. Not a burning bush. Not a mountaintop revelation. A bathroom floor that Teddy had personally mopped with diminishing enthusiasm for half a decade, discovering a leather-bound volume that smelled like incense and existential dread.

The title was embossed in gold: The Annotated Survival Guide to Your Imminent Cosmic Irrelevance.

"Cool," Teddy said to nobody, because talking to yourself in bathrooms is fine when you're thirty-four and single and your therapist has described your attachment style as "aggressively avoidant." "Cool cool cool."

He took the book home to his apartment—a converted garage in Ballard that his landlord optimistically called a "junior studio" and that Teddy more accurately called "a place where grey comes to die." The grey was a permanent resident. Teddy was pretty sure it paid more rent than he did.

He opened the book.

Dear Reader, the first page said, If you're reading this, you've already fucked up in ways you can't possibly comprehend. But don't worry. So has everyone else. That's sort of the whole point.

Teddy blinked. He turned the page.

Chapter One: You Are Not Special (And That's the Good News)

Let's get this out of the way: You are a temporary arrangement of atoms that will, in cosmological terms, exist for approximately the amount of time it takes the universe to sneeze. Your problems? Meaningless. Your achievements? Forgettable. Your ex who said you were "emotionally unavailable"? Correct, but also irrelevant to the fundamental structure of spacetime.

This is not meant to depress you. This is meant to free you.

Because here's what nobody tells you about cosmic irrelevance: it goes both ways. Yes, nothing you do matters to the universe. But also? Nothing you do matters to the universe. You're free. You've always been free. You've just been too scared to notice.

Teddy read until 3 AM, which was a problem because he had to open the shop at 6. He read about how human consciousness was basically the universe trying to look at itself in a mirror and getting confused. He read about how love was "a temporary insanity that nonetheless constitutes the only valid response to existence." He read about death, which the book treated with the same casual familiarity as a neighbor you nod to but never really talk to.

The margins were full of handwritten notes. Different handwriting, different inks, spanning what looked like decades. Previous readers had left their own annotations:

"This part helped when my mom died."

"Bullshit. But useful bullshit."

"Read this section every morning for a year. Still an asshole, but a more peaceful asshole."

And, mysteriously, in red ink near the end of Chapter Seven: "Give this to Teddy Yuen when you're done. He needs it more than you."

Teddy did not sleep. He went to work. He made lattes with the mechanical precision of someone who has made approximately forty thousand lattes and can now do it while experiencing a low-grade spiritual crisis.

"You look like shit," said Destiny, his coworker, who had the kind of name that suggested her parents were either deeply optimistic or deeply ironic and who was the only person at Brewed Awakening that Teddy actually liked.

"I found a book," Teddy said.

"In the bathroom?"

"How did you—"

"Everyone finds something in that bathroom eventually. Mine was a ticket stub to a Fleetwood Mac concert from 1977. I cried for like an hour." Destiny shrugged. "The bathroom knows things."

This was, Teddy realized, the most Seattle sentence he had ever heard, and he had once overheard someone describe their ayahuasca ceremony to a skeptical DMV employee.

The book changed things. Not dramatically, not overnight, but in the slow way that water changes stone.

Teddy started calling his mother more. Not because the book told him to, but because Chapter Twelve had this bit about how most regret comes from "the shit you didn't do rather than the shit you did" and his mother wasn't getting younger and neither was he and time was—as the book put it—"a one-way street with no U-turns and shitty traffic."

He started writing music again. Terrible music at first, songs that sounded like Elliott Smith had been possessed by the ghost of a depressed sea shanty. But then less terrible. Then, occasionally, something that made him feel like his chest was cracking open in a way that wasn't entirely unpleasant.

He asked Destiny out for coffee, which was professionally awkward given that they worked at a coffee shop. She said yes. Their first date was at a taco truck, and she told him about her divorce and her daughter and her dream of opening a bookstore that only sold books people had actually finished, and Teddy realized he was feeling something that felt alarmingly like hope. Hope, he had learned, felt a lot like nausea. The book had warned him about this. "Hope and terror are neurologically almost identical," Chapter Fifteen had said. "You're not broken. You're just confused. Welcome to consciousness."

"What was in the book?" Destiny asked, three months later, lying in Teddy's grey-soaked garage apartment, wearing one of his shirts and looking at him with the particular expression of someone who was trying to figure out if this was going to last.

"Instructions," Teddy said. "On how to stop being so afraid."

"Did they work?"

"I don't know. I'm still afraid of lots of things. Dying. Failure. That I'm going to wake up one day and realize I wasted my whole life making oat milk lattes for people who didn't even really want them."

"But?"

"But the book said that's okay. The fear, I mean. It said fear is just your brain trying to keep you alive, and you can thank it for its service and then do the thing anyway." He paused. "It also said that expecting to be unafraid is like expecting to be tall. You can want it all you want, but your nervous system doesn't give a shit about your preferences."

Destiny laughed. "I like that."

"The book?"

"The book. You. The whole thing." She rolled over, pressed her face against his shoulder. "This whole impossible, ridiculous thing."

A year later, Teddy left the book in the bathroom at Brewed Awakening. A different bathroom—the original had been renovated in 2019, and according to Destiny the new toilet was "cosmically inert." But the backup bathroom still had the mojo.

He thought about keeping it. The margins were full now—his own notes alongside all the others, a conversation across decades with strangers who had held this same book and struggled with the same stupid human stuff he struggled with. But the book had been pretty clear about this, too: Chapter Twenty-Three, titled "On Letting Go of Shit That Was Never Yours to Begin With."

He tucked a note into the back cover: "This helped. Pass it on."

Someone would find it. Someone who needed it. Someone who was maybe thirty-four and working a job they'd taken temporarily six years ago and wondering if this was all there was.

The book would tell them what it had told Teddy: Yes, this is all there is. And also: This is everything. Both statements are true. Both statements are the point.

Teddy walked out into the Seattle rain, which was doing its thing, which was being everywhere and nowhere at once, which was what rain does here, which was—when you really thought about it—kind of miraculous.

He was late to meet Destiny. She was going to give him shit about it. They were going to eat bad Thai food and argue about which Alien movie was the best—Aliens, obviously, this was not up for debate—and then go back to his place and maybe make out on the couch like teenagers, or maybe just sit there in comfortable silence, which was its own kind of intimacy.

None of it mattered. All of it mattered. Both things were true.

Teddy Yuen walked into the rain, and the rain—as it always did—swallowed him whole.