gloamingdaydream

“So, _______ brought you here, huh?” They ask. They’ve taken back their human form here, floating in the vast space of their soul.

“You’ve been sitting in the same position for two days on the outside.” I tell them. “I was worried about you, so I asked him to take me here so that we could talk.”

“Two days?” They shrug. “That’s not even an attosecond to me, right now. If you took every year I’d been alive up to the point I absorbed that _________, multiplied it by a million, and then multiplied that million by two trillions, that still would fall short of even a quarter of half a percent of the amount of millenia I’ve been here, waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think I ever knew. Or if I did, I’ve forgotten that I did. It’s peaceful here, there’s nothing to stop me from being. I look all around me, I go up, down, left, right, or what I once would assume are these things. They’re all gone now, melted into one universal entity, everything is one and the same. I’ve finally reached the state of nonexistence I yearned for my entire life.”

“I see…and would you say that you’re happy in this state? Would you remain like this for all eternity, even knowing that we’re all waiting for you outside?”

“I wouldn’t say so. Being happy implies a state where the possibility of not being happy exists. I’m not happy, nor am I unhappy, nor am I any of those hundreds of other interconnecting states that constantly shift from minute to minute, from second to second. It’s impossible to pinpoint emotion in a higher realm where nothing seems to really touch me inside, despite me being as insidious as possible. I know you want me to come back, I’ve come to terms long ago with the status of our relationship. I couldn’t before, because I was blinded by the ego of assuming the worst of you, of intentionally and presumptiously twisting your most innocent thoughts into a twisted spike that you’d use as a sword against me. That version of you is a creation of mine that I discarded long ago, allowing me to accept your feelings towards me, and mine to you.”

“I kind of understand what you’re saying.”

After that, we stayed silent for a while. Maybe a year or so passed, I couldn’t exactly tell. They asked me if floating around like that was bothering me, I said I didn’t mind, but they built a house anyway. A house in the center of their universe, similar to the one they left behind in a time almost lost to them, but not quite. It was the same red couch, the same scratch marks and hair strewn on the spots they’d always been, it just seemed right. Was it a perfect imitation of an objective, physical reality? Or was it a sign of their emotional dissonance being overplayed?

We ate pepperoni pizza, the one we used to order from that place right next door, the cheese melting in our mouths. We ate takis, and doritos, and lasagna, and all sorts of chicken wings, and we also had those dreaded poutines I always claimed I’d try but had never gotten to. I wondered to myself if those counted, and they assured me it did: Everything here was real, there were no illusions, no trick to conjure up. All the atoms were carefully curated and were as real as the world outside, the world that existed outdoors. And yet, even though we found ourselves in the space between two numbers, it was still all real. I asked if they wanted to listen to some music, they said that if I wanted to I could go ahead, but that they had already listened to all of the earth’s music. All of it? Yes, all. They could no longer really distinguish between genres, it all folded together in one big bright blurb inside their head. They also said they’d read every piece of literature, all of it. Back in the days, Moby Dick had been their favourite novel, now it was just another passing strand of thousands of words glued together.

How long had they been here, I asked. Definitely more than 150 years. In fact, that might have been a little bit of a lowball. Even if they doubled that, it wouldn’t amount to half their stay. They hadn’t lied about the days now feeling like attoseconds to them. An infinite amount of time to contemplate everything and nothing. The first few decades had been spent in deep thought about every possible subject, but that passionate self-discourse had eventually also withered away, and now the soul matched the body in its sloth, drifting in a self-made oblivion.

“How long are you going to stay here?” They ask me.

“As long as you want me to stay.” I answer.

“Why?”

“Because I’ll always be here for you. The others haven’t even noticed my departure, not even a fraction of a second has passed for them, so they can wait. But in your life, I’m the speck. You’ll spend eternity in a lonely anguish, and I want to take away as much of that as possible, even if it’s just a tiny drop that’s going to be swept away in the river. So don’t worry, I’ll always be there for you.”

I stayed there for two years. They said they could recreate the Earth, we could live there, have more things to do. I said no, it wouldn’t be the same, it wouldn’t be our Earth. It would be alive, but something else. We lived in that same house floating in the depths of their own headspace for the entirety of those two years.

The day I left was the day I brought them back with me. I knew they’d been starting to consider a return. They told me they realized they were not a God. 

“The others are all born that way, they are born with everything and with nothing simultaneously. I wasn’t, I lived as a human. Even though those first 20 years are microscopic compared to what I lived through after absorbing the baby, they still resurface, they still never shatter. I said when you first came that I stopped feeling anything, and that was true. But it stopped being true after I met you again, after I stopped being completely alone with nothing but my own thoughts. I wonder if they could ever communicate with each other like we humans do. They would probably find it inefficient and not worth their time, but I don’t. I’m not like them. I want to feel cold at night again, freezing under the covers of my bed. I want to remember how it felt like to read Moby Dick. The best part about literature is that you can never read all of it, and yet I did, and so the spark faded. I want to listen to music again, to drown myself in a world of my creation that superimposes itself on reality rather than completely superseding it.”

They told me to wait for a while with them. We sat on a bench at the edge of the universe, looking at all the stars that were yet to be born, and all the suns that blew up long ago. We saw all the comets that flew across space like a fireworks show, there were thousands upon thousands of them. We witnessed plants grow on a newborn planet, and then we saw them wither away after decades of evolution. All of that we observed in mere seconds.

When it was time to leave, neither of us said a word. We knew we’d see each other on the other side of the wall. I waved to them as a bright light took me to a place far, far away.