There is a theory that everything began as stardust, that life was an impossibly rare occurrence - one among thousands of planets. That the dinosaurs roamed before us and wonder is the product of ancestral mistakes. Each falcon then slightly swifter than the last. There are believers who worship the divine in complete reverence of their creations. Look around you, they’ll say, at the falcon’s wings and the night sky’s vast – isn’t God just wonderful. But there’s another, I read recently, that the mind is the one thing of certainty we hold and all external to it can be thought its product –  imagination’s child

Your existence is a thorn lodged deep in every proposition. For if the universe sprung from within me, you’d be the best thing I’ve ever come up with. Above the mysteries of the deep sea and all of nature’s details – with those, I can forgo my disbelief. Yet between us, I could not dream you if I tried. Inconceivable you, I’d first turn to religion. Perhaps, of the many deities we believe in, there is one who could’ve made you up. Now the problem becomes an impossible one, I tell you. The time it would take to sculpt you from mud leaves just enough room for void and nothing more. Maybe that was what caused the big bang. The gods grew tired after slaving over a masterpiece that they let entropy take course for the rest of us. In candid, I wouldn’t mind being mere part of the universe that sprung around you.

Your existence is a wonder I do not dare to question. So I’ll hold you with the gentlest touch as if you were made of mist. Luminescent limbs I see you as. Though most days, you’re flesh and bone. Lanky and bent yet sharp as knives with words that can cut as clean. Imperfect and wonderful. And I’ll enjoy myself in your presence without letting you know that when I hold you with the gentlest touch, a sigh of relief from glowing heat. You’re here, flesh and bone, and I do not dare to question.

Alarm goes off

3:49

I do not wake

I let it die

It’s been like this

For quite some time

A floating rest

I say I’m fine

There was no start

Is there an end?

What I can’t fix

I do not mend

If I could stop

My beating heart

I will not wake

At 5 A.M.

In decades’ time, I will leave this barren land the way I came in. In frightful quiet after ages of deafening noise, I will leave unnoticed. Rain will hit the windowpane and serve background music in a phone conversation. Much the same, time will pass as melanin drains from my hair - then ebony, now a clock-tainted white.

I will not notice how my mother has turned to ashes. Her voice would still bellow from the kitchen thirty years after our last dinner. It would travel through space like ripples on water, long after the pebble sinks.

When my child lies in the same bedroom that has housed my sisters and I, she will be raised by catastrophe. Earthquakes will cradle her in place of my arms. Storms will come, they will teach her how to say goodnight even when there is little good left. Rain will sing her lullabies, with the occasional hum to a thunder’s snare drum. She will know not to fear lightning when it strikes. Because it is magical. That moment of pure brightness, after surviving ages in blinding dark.

--- end.