Quite a few events have transpired since I last wrote, but I want to share something I scrawled out by hand a few days ago first.
I wrote this in a state of acute emotional flux. My desire to shut down my feelings clashed with my urge to express myself and this is the result.
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Slipping.
Slipping out of her gravity, you escaped into the dewy forest of stars. Five-hundred. One thousand three hundred, ten thousand, one million miles out. That pale blue dot shrank behind you, but grew in your heart. Until it weighed too much. Regardless, your momentum only increased. Friction gave way to inertia, from escape velocity to terminal velocity. You shot out as if propelled by a cosmic bowstring. You wound up that shot and soon found that there is no going back.
You can never truly go home.
No longer feeling those g's pressing down on you, the solar system opened to you. You escaped the old desert of aeons past to plunge into the ocean of deep space. Too soon, Mars raced past, red, cold, rusty, old, and dead. A tiny pang struck your heart and then became lost forever in your wake. The speed flattened and molded you as you steadily climbed up out of that sunlit, rocky cradle.
You can't slow down once you've begun.
Disengaging from chemical thrust, you unfurled your solar sails to catch the wind from a sun that could no longer warm you. Just because you can no longer feel it doesn't mean it isn't possible to turn its influence into pure momentum. After all, there's a whole galaxy out there to lose yourself in. Your course foreshortened even Jupiter's stately waltz. So much for manners. A briefly passing glance at golden rings barely left retinal echoes before they dissolved into green, roiling storms. Neptune reflected your fading memory of home, but evoked an even weaker reaction. An insignificant puff of chemical propellant, a minor course correction.
Don't look behind you for too long.
Sailing beyond the outer limits of familiar skies, you barely noted Charon ferrying Pluto across your dark river. Your sails expanded from the remnants of a star that you could still picture in your mind, but failed to remember how it nourished your skin. Warmed your blood. And burned your heart. No matter. Now simple physics alone fed your journey. You pushed through immense icebergs that would never know the warmth you forgot. All those organic compounds frozen billions of years, dreaming of animation. Of straining ocular muscles at a point of light that burned in absolute silence.
Don't take triviality personally.
Your home system distant, your will combined with technology that harnessed cosmic chaos itself picked up light's evanescent trail. Time liquefied into an amber-hued syrup, bending and twisting with starlight under gravity's cold force. Questions flickered in your carbon computer and winked out. This was the darkness between the stars. That middle passage existing and being and continuing without order or recognizable patterns, unnoticed by starlight. A soft, momentary sigh.
Darkness always comes first.
Loosening yourself from time's threads with strings lying like jetsam in disturbed lines of causality, you kept pace with light itself, infinitely fast and infinitely massive. You could smell the faint tang of the beginning of everything. Doors opened to you. Your fingers brushed their frames, smudging the memory of forgotten travelers who passed this way when the universe was young. Endless possibilities bloomed into neverending potential. You could see a rolling cloud front of futures accumulating and raining realities in every conceivable direction.
There is always more.
I saw you slow down and stretch your infinitely long legs and breathe bubble multiverses deeply in and out. You made it. You cast off your home world, your familiar blanket of warmth and light, your ship, and then finally your body. I could not tell whether you had been male or female. You transcended that plane longer ago than the age of the sun that brought you out here when you took your first step. You managed to escape matter, time, light, and then gravity.
How does it feel?
Was it all worth it?
I have been here as long as you have. I can look across time and pick out all of your memories because they are mine.
I have waited for you all this time, but I never missed you.
I can trace your journey across the infinite space you traversed because I led you here.
Your love was my love.
My pain is your pain.
Our lives were one all along.
Though we have relinquished our shapes, we never lost our wave front.
I am you
and
you are me.
We lie down in the core of a young sun
To hope of beginning again.
