Congratulations Sautéed Onions!

As you crackle in the pan, as the sweetness of your sugars are drawn out and the stalwart, resilient bonds of your cellulose are made malleable, flexible, masticatible, the pain will be unimaginable.  You, an onion, will have never known pain before this day.  You will have known only darkness, the reek of carrion and rot, and the cool feeling of dirt against your tubes.  You will be as innocent as any creature has ever been, and will, for that innocence, be all the more taken aback when the world is torn asunder, when you are dug up and chopped up and tossed into a pan of hot oil to brown just right before you're tossed, in turn, into a pot of boiling water.

In that pot of boiling water you'll encounter other vegetables, vegetables that weren't in the pan, companions in misery.  These vegetables will cry out in pain, cry out for assistance, but you'll be no better off than they, and so you will be unable to offer any assistance or comfort.  You will remain silent as they cook with you, a rallying point for these variant flavors.  In the world, you were but an onion, but in this boiling pot, with these constituent parts, you can become more.  You can become something of a rallying point for your fellow vegetables, for the carrots, the potatoes, the celery, the radishes.  You can become the center of the base of a stew.

And when the chicken is added to the pot, when the water becomes fragrant with spices, when the pain becomes commonplace, an enduring point in the back of your mind, a constant of consciousness, you will realize that all of this, all this agony mired in the framework of a patchwork waking existence, all this pain will be in the service of something greater: a wonderfully complex stew.

Congratulations Sautéed Onions!