Recall

Galaxies circled in the universe, all seemed ordered. Within galaxies stars orbited their cores. Eternal they seemed, wheeling in an eternal dance of creation. Around these stars worlds orbited, their surfaces warmed by the wave-particle duality of photons, the building blocks of light, that erupted from the surfaces of these nuclear furnaces. And smaller still were worlds within worlds; of electrons circling the atomic nucleus. Everything ordered, a pattern followed, but on different scales...

Welcome to the world. He was registered, he was numbered. A blank page. A mind to be programmed.

He had vague recollections, echoes of echoes; the shadow men who walked on the landing of his childhood home and into his room. Yet the memory was soon suppressed and forgotten, as he grew. Likewise the imaginary friend who played with him, there came a day when his visage and voice faded to nothing. His friend had been sad but had known that the day would come. But time moves on and childhood is fleeting. The one…

And all the time he learned, and the radio and television spoke with louder and louder voices in the corner, describing and setting the boundaries of the world. His mind, once open and boundless, now grew walls and the more he was taught the closer the walls drew.

As he grew he needed to escape reality. He saw how unremitting it was on his parents; their lives seemed joyless when they should have been seizing every moment of existence. He was sure they loved one another and yet they bickered constantly. He wanted to play with them but day in day out; they awoke to a day of drudgery to keep the roof over their heads and the wolf from the door. While he was sent to be educated in a regime that prepared him for the same future.

He read; comics at first and then books. He read fantasy, it seemed as an echo of what once was and yet it was unreal when compared with historical accounts which were written as fact, despite them only setting preordained boundaries.

Some literature seemed to form a bridge between the historical and phantasmagorical. There were magic and amazing creatures described in these ancient tales; gods seemed to connect directly with mortals but these ancient stories were discounted, labelled merely as myths and legends. Try as he might he saw no fairies at the bottom of his garden. He was shown pictures of cave walls in some books and in his mind’s eye something stirred; the beating of wood on wood, the blowing of hollowed bones, and the chanting of stories. He seemed to be able to picture the wall-bound animals came alive with the flickering of the fire. A strident voice brought him back to the present with the accusation of him day dreaming. An echo was left in his mind, an echo he clung to. The world was as it was, but time moves on and innocence is fleeting.

The echo resonated in music. With his headphones on and his eyes shut, the music painted landscapes of wonder in his mind. He and some similarly minded friends experimented with narcotic fungi in their teens, altering their perception as they stumbled around a field. They did it for fun and yet, in the haze of oblivion… for a time it all made sense, there was a feeling of oneness among them, a place in the divine cosmos; they were made from stars amid the stars. The one love…

He found love with another; they shared moments of that oneness again, enjoying each other’s bodies yet forgetting they were trapped within their own prisons of flesh for a time. But time moves on and carefree summers are fleeting. The one love that…

He grew, aspiring to manhood, his future seemed set; it would be like clockwork, mirroring the wheeling of the stars and planets; regular and preordained. He was prepared by education to be another cog in the machine of labour, whereby a concept, called money, was brought forth from thin air and made somehow real; empowering some and enslaving others. To have anything you had to have it. Yet the birds and wild animals still lived and the rain fell free from the sky; but onto a land that now was owned and fenced? There was no magic in the world, the divine was an illusion?

All around friends knuckled down, as did he. They seemed to synchromesh into the machine of labour, pursuing the money concept that was universally accepted yet totally alien. And yet...

To look at  the night-time infinite star field reminded him of a different age, when he had looked at the same distant suns through different eyes, the feeling of déjà vu, a sudden jolt that grabbed his soul. Small he was, insignificant even. Yet here he existed, a body manufactured from the divine alchemy of stars, stars that had burned for near eternities until exploding across the sky shedding their bodies to the infinite. The light from the distant candles may have taken millennia to reach his eyes. It linked him to all of creation on this world and beyond, here and now, and in the distant past and the far future. Then he knew, the one love that binds, and he recalled at last, despite the chains of reality that he had been bound with. Life was far from mundane and he was no mere number, he had never been a blank page and it was the programme which was in error…

Everything is basically falling. At the centre of the galaxy is a hole,  a hole so black that light itself can not escape it. It is insatiably hungry. Its a well of unimaginable depth and mass, that stretches the fabric of space time to a  singular point, that surely must break in a rift or a tear. But what lies beyond its darkest depths is a multiverse of innumerable possibilities.