She Knows I am Here

I was born ten billion years old.

I can feel your confusion, hear the aching protest of your rational, fact-based mind.

“That can’t possibly be true.” You are thinking to yourself—you are young; so young you cannot even begin to comprehend the span of 10,000 years, let alone ten billion, but—

Let me tell you that you are missing the point; I was not conceived in the womb nor did I wink into existence at a specified point in time.

Each cell in my body—each molecule was once part of a star, or a distant planet, all that I am is a sentient conglomerate of Hydrogen, Carbon, Oxygen and Nitrogen—elements that existed before I gained consciousness and will continue on tens of thousands of centuries after I perish and return to the stars from whence I came.

Were you not little once? Were you not a child? Did you dream once? Were you not so beguiled?

No, not beguiled, enlightened.

At three years of age, scarcely able to speak in complete thoughts and yet fully aware of the incomprehensible truth around me…

Imagine if you will, a clear night in October where the only sounds that can be heard is the steady and constant inhalation and exhalation of the earth, the only light that can be seen is illusory for it waned out of existence tens of billions of years ago…

The child points with one small and smooth finger at the light of a star that no longer exists,

And yet each atom in that tiny appendage is made of the same material,

The same fabric interweaving the cosmos, giving meaning to all that we are and all that is.

When her deep brown eyes blink,

Can you see the flecks of gold and purple and blue and pink and red and yellow,

Can you see the quasars and galaxies and galactic clouds of stardust,

Can you perceive that within her very body lies the truth of existence, lies a universe within itself?

She is God embodied, she is our guru and religious leader, she is Allah, Yaweh, Krishna, and Buddha all at once.

Each strand of her ebony hair is a solar system, each ridge of her fingerprints a mountain and valley, so grandiose, yet so commonplace all at once.

She is a miracle.

She is all these things, and none of these things.

And so are we.

We are both the meaning for the universe

And nothing compared to it.

I was born ten billion years old.

So was my brother, my father, my mother.

We are nothing and everything, amazing and unimportant.

Illusory, and…the realest thing there is.

If I were to tell you that the sands on the beach couldn’t describe the cosmos—

that if each individual grain was its own solar system, its own galaxy,

that it still couldn’t compare to the unfathomable immensity of the known and unknown universe,

tell me then, how could we be the only ones thinking of these things?

How could our ancestors, with feathered headdresses and sundials and crude astronomical devices describing the night sky be the only ones in this incredible sea of stars in which all of existence lies? The only beings capable of intelligent thought—capable of imagining life beyond that little girl’s beating heart and the mother who birthed her?

No, this is folly. This is the most of folly to even conceive of such things.

There is much, much too much that is, to think that we are the only ones wondering whether we are the only ones wondering about it.

Because that little girl is me.

No longer held in the safe embrace of my mother’s strong and absolutely true arms,

when I look at the night sky, I see the same thing.

But there is more I can fathom when my finger points up at what I believe to be Venus smiling at me, that finger on which rests an entire universe that I cannot begin to imagine,

For far across the stars in a place I will never see, and a home I will never know,

She is standing, her finger pointed at what she perceives to be Alpha Centauri in her own solar system, in her own galaxy, wondering the exact same thing.

And even though I can’t describe what she might look like or what her life consists of,

I know she is there.

And as she smiles, untouchable across the span of ten million lightyears, yet…

She knows I am here.