It Began

Author’s Note: It’s interesting to imagine what the boundless curiosity and playfulness of a child would create, if only it could.

          Like all things living it began as a baby. It gurgled and squirmed and contemplated the darkness around it and imagined light. And then there was light. And its infantile imagination reeled at its creation and made more of it, flinging it about until the darkness all around was speckled with the tiny pinpricks of countless lights far away in the distance. And the baby forgot what darkness was.

            Then the baby stared at the closer lights, transfixed by their warmth and beauty and perfect shape. And it imagined other things like them but without the light. And then there were worlds. Again delighted at its creations, the baby imagined more of all sizes and shapes and flung them to the cosmos as well.

            Then the baby noticed itself, set aglow by the shining lights. It stretched and flexed and twisted about, as babies are wont to do, and imagined other things like itself, to greater or lesser degrees, as it played. And then there were creatures. And, delighted again, it created others and imagined them flying through nothingness, dancing on the lights and clinging to the worlds as those marbled globes streaked through the bejeweled darkness and fell into circular harmony with lights here and there.

            The baby watched the creatures and felt through them and knew joy and contentment and hunger and pain. And with pain came tears to the baby’s eyes, which it saw and contemplated and imagined much bigger and everywhere, flying through nothingness, dancing on the lights and clinging to the worlds. And then there were seas and rivers and rain.

            Then the baby looked on the creatures again and felt what they felt and knew what they knew. Until the baby saw death, and knowing death, died.

            And the universe, void of its tiny creator, settled into a rhythm like the beat of a heart.