Want to hear me read the story?
Things were quiet back then. I didn’t know the sound of your voice. I couldn’t fathom light sculpting your silhouette.
I didn’t even know. How to know. I wasn’t capable. Nothing was. Back then, these very words, this language didn’t exist. The senses we now use to reach beyond the prison of our minds toward meaning didn’t exist. Meaning didn’t exist. There was none.
But we were there.
Nothing was made back then. You could say that the universe hadn’t even began, because it hadn’t. Only it couldn’t be said.
There was no language. There was no meaning. There was no time.
We were together. There, then.
Deep in the pages of the past, at the very beginning of all things, we were there. Entangled. Timeless. Before time. Before light. Before darkness. Before everything that can now be described.
Together. Quiet. Still.
Before presence, before absence. We were so tightly entwined with each other, not even the unstoppable force we now know as entropy could part us. Yet, in that placeless place, it wasn’t just us. All other things were there too – the man who cut you off in traffic, the first ice cream you ate, and the grains of rice, soaking up the soy sauce of our first shared meal.
At that undefined moment before time even began, at the unknowing, unremarkable singularity, we shared every joule of energy. We shared it with everything else. At that moment, we were beside every other couple that would ever find love, and every misanthrope who would look on in contempt.
We had no form; it was infinitely warm. And yet, in some indistinct, unknown catalyst of future events, there was all time. If it had lungs, the universe held its breath. If it had a nervous system, it was ready to react.
The universe exhaled. The warmth cascaded away, and our blazing pre-existential hearth immediately began to cool. Time began.
Our knot was untied, and that was when the universe began.
That was when we were first torn apart. We began by losing each other.
The quiet is different now. It is silent without you.
Did we remain close after that moment, or were we dragged asunder by the cosmos and reunited countless times over millions of years? Did you drift to another primordial mass, and become part of another galactic form?
Or did gravity bind your being to unreachable, distant mass, a speck of cosmic dust, unseen in the otherwise empty black? When did you coalesce into a star? How many billion years did it take for all your particles to be arranged into the complex elemental forms that led to your corporeal, current form?
Even the stars couldn’t keep you, so what hope did I ever have? They too, must collapse so that I might encounter you again someday.
We were both elemental specks of dust. One day, we’d get to use language to speak to each other. Perhaps a meteor containing your underlying elemental substance crashed into this planet. Maybe you were here alone, and maybe I was the meteor.
What devastation did I wreak upon the land, the sea, the sky, in search of you?
It is impossible to know. There are too many variables, there are too many computations, and we know the past. It is an unchanging precursor. I know only one thing of the past.
We were always there. And forever, unseen, disinterred historians will look upon the ledger of existence. They will trace vectors of inelegant, chaotic motion. Away, together, away again.
Further apart, further away, and perhaps, again maybe, together.
Wherever your particles voyaged, and wherever I wandered — alone — the only thing we truly shared was distance. Somehow, gravity, magnetism and other forces bring back together what was scattered. They don’t have memories, but I do.
Memories of what it was like to be with you, before I knew you.
Maybe it is fate that all things may be reunited, brought back to each other. The greatest tragedy: we can never be as close we were in that eternal moment before the vast silence of epochs.
But then again, never, like eternity is an impossible concept.
That day was entirely unremarkable in the continuum. Few clouds loomed overhead, casting shadows on the wet concrete of the museum forecourt. Sunlight glistened in the puddles, reflecting children at play among the sculptures of geometric shapes. Their laughter made a smile erupt from their mother, watching on.
An autumn leaf sailed across the grey, it carried on currents of breeze between the mother’s gaze and the child’s path, a reminder that they too would one day fall from the tree of their watchful mother, and drift beyond the reach of her loving embrace.
Every day they grew a little more, as they did each day, and today was no different. Laughter. Smiles. A slip, a grazed knee. In the watery puddle, blood bloomed like an expanding star. The mother leapt into compassionate action.
Suddenly, I felt a twinge of pain in my own knee, a memory of my own childhood’s pain, cascading from past to present.
I entered the museum; I had come to gaze upon the chunk of meteorite. Dense. It wasn’t even in the middle of the room. It was about the size of a hotel bar fridge, black with countless flecks of metal shimmering like glitter under the light.
That piece of rock had travelled through billions of places, only to end up here, again. It was entirely unremarkable, beyond the fact that it was not of our Earth. It was uncomfortably cold to the touch. Its journey was over. It had no energy left. It was an object at rest.
As I contemplated then, and as I contemplate now, my memory of the moments is indistinct, laced with shadows. I remember a single thing. Inside that place, I remember you entering and standing by my side. You were alone. I was alone.
The silence parted with your voice, “Hello.” I wasn’t sure if you were speaking to me, or to the stone. I turned to face you, and I froze. I remembered you. I had never met you, but I remembered you, from some vast galactic past, a stranger in the mist, returned to my side.
“We were together, once”, I said to the room, nodding toward the rock.
Your voice held no hesitation in reply, “At the singularity,”
We sat beside each other, never across the table. We shared meals. We turned to smile at each other with desert on our faces. The spoons clattered into the dishwasher. You put dirty things in with the clean.
I hated the heater running in the winter, the only warm air I enjoyed was your breath. It was never stale. I was always one for heavy blankets. I slept like a thrashing shark. I rose before the dawn; you rose only for the double digits of the clock.
You saw the scars and looked on in concern and sadness. I felt your heartbeat through your chest, into my ear. I knew at that moment it would one day cease, it made me sad, lying on that bed in that rented townhouse.
We argued about something, once. I can’t remember anymore. We stormed the corridor, from opposite directions, colliding in an embrace of apology and understanding.
I drove on the highway. You snored in the passenger seat. The river was low; and the only thing interrupting the night sky was the tree cover. Onions made us cry.
You always questioned the missing pieces of chocolate. I always purchased more, paying for a lack of self-control with a currency composed of apologies.
We stood there, together, on the day I introduced you to my father. You didn’t expect to be introduced to a small piece of stone, laid in the soil, inscribed with pragmatic records that documented clearly. Here Lies Father. Born in place I never knew, died in one I’ll never see. A sentence on a stone, a tightness in my chest.
I held back tears at your grandmother’s funeral. I never knew the woman, but I saw your family breaking down, and that made me emotional. Later, I struggled with the hills and the humidity and the weight of an unread eulogy in my back pocket.
You always cherished my enthusiasm for everything. I overwhelmed you with interest in various topics and spent time with you, alone, but together. I thought often of the circumstances that led to us being and marveled at unlikely dice rolls of the universe.
We sat on the edge of the rented bed, reading wedding cards and counting money, too full of apple pie and happiness.
I travelled at a rapid pace. You relaxed.
You always tolerated me. You always loved me. I hear your snoring in the drone of passing cars. I no longer feel your warmth in the blankets as I still thrash beneath them.
It is quiet again.
It is dark again.
It is cold again.
Now, you thrash in the winds of the Earth, dispersed to countless places by the whims of nature. Like my father, like your grandmother, your time in this place has passed and gone.
Your side of the bed is no longer warm. With my restless sleeping, the bed always felt too small, now it is as vast as the cosmos.
Your dirty spoons will never again mingle with the clean dishes. The aroma of your tea is gone from the curtains. The mundane dance of your daily habits will never repeat in this place. Your laughter will never ring out across the house.
Nature has stripped it all away from me. All I can do now is wait for it to be my turn. My turn to be stripped away to atoms. Exhale to silence, bones churned to dust.
All that will be left are the elemental particles that temporarily made up my consciousness. When I am gone, so too will the memory of you.
Each day, the residues of memory will continue to flicker and fade, like the light from a dying sun.
The evening took you.
The night’s greedy maw swallowed you whole.
The night is now only full of the unheard echoes of your voice, of your laughter, the way you said my name. My body, racked with sorrow and sobbing is now the loudest sound in this house.
Outside, a bird gathers twigs for its nest, thinking, if it might, about its chicks. It hears nothing of my sorrow. It comprehends nothing as it scratches at its perch before flying off.
I am left behind. I am alone.
We were together. Not just for duration of a brief season of humanity, but for the quantum of a moment in a universe that started from a single point and expanded ceaselessly to encompass all joy and sorrow.
But one day, it too will cease its expansion. Time, too, will forget that it has one direction. Stars will close their eyes. Galaxies will begin to collapse under the forces of gravity. The universe will hold its last breath.
Then, the cold will return. The space between summer and winter will vanish. The space between space will vanish. Entropy will lose her voice, and all the matter in the universe will remember its home and return to its nest. The greatest migration ever.
The traffic will be horrible in those moments, our particles weaving through the writhing, rapidly accelerating masses back to where it all began.
Together again, in the new singularity.
