All That is, is Not

 Long ago, before we were, something was. It had no name then, and has no name now, but it was all there was. It found within itself a wish, but nothing could grant it. Because of this, it remained in a catatonic neutrality; where it saw stars, it also saw an absence of them. Where it may have heard the thrum of quarks, was a spacious silence of nothing. Where there was, there was also not. It remained in the compromising infinitude between moments until it could bear no more. It began to shed itself, to rip into itself until something, one thing, could be. And finally it began to move on. And finally it could be relieved. And finally it could create. And finally it could reflect. And after all of this that it had achieved, it was left with the hunger of the void. The voice that whispered a wish from somewhere close enough that it hoped it hadn’t heard the echo. And the hunger followed it, wherever it wandered, whatever form it had taken, whispering a wish. And, once it was satisfied with all it had made, all it had remembered, all it was and would be, it could hear the voice for the first moment. And when it heard the voice, it turned to look at the nothing, and it jumped inside. Its creation would prevail in all the many forms, in all the many ways, and it would keep the darkness fed until there was nothing of it left. It knows what will happen then. It knows what the word goodbye means. It knows it will hurt. It knows it will die. And once all of it will be swallowed by the hunger, it will return to that lonely place where nothing moves, and nothing feels, and nothing is. It is already there, but it is also moving through time, alive and dead, growing and falling, making art and culture, feeling pain and grief and love, gazing with the eye of curiosity, reaching with the hand of malice, imagining a self, knowing and caring and flying and charging and hurting and shifting from creatures to matter to reactions to particles that make up particles. It was all of this and more. Yes, this would do. Yes, this will end. Yes, this will be done in perpetuity. Yes, this was its wish.