Everything was so fast, so confusing.
Since the moment I was born, I ran without stopping. Never stopping to wonder what the purpose was, or simply to wonder at what surrounded me. I ran weightless, feeling nothing but the race. Not the adrenaline, nor the endorphins. Around me an entire universe was built, a universe to which I was oblivious.
I ran, and motes of energy became matter, galaxies and motion. I ran, yet I did not move. I was trapped in a timeless state of frozen momentum. While I remained a lonely mote, molecules merged into larger organisms. Time allowed life to exist around me.
What is time?
Why did it not exist for me?
Why everything around me was able to experience life, but not me?
What made me so different?
What brought me here?
Luck?
Destiny?
My run suddenly ended when I crashed into a soft fabric that created time for me. During the first months I couldn’t think, I only felt that I became something that could be touched. Now I know that the fabric was a green leaf, and I had finally become matter.
I was light, then I was a pear, then I was the fur of a mammal, then I was grass, then I was flesh, and eventually I became a traveller inside a brain. Only then did I become part of a thought.
What is time?
The distance between cause and effect.
That is as much as I understood.
I was a mote of energy that slowed down enough to be part of this universe, and now, as these thoughts come into being, I travel through the maze of a brain.
I see how this person feels about you.
I see how deeply the desire to understand you lives here.
I see how this person sees your words, hears your drawings, until everything merges into a single thought. A thought that fires motes like me through what humans call a neurone.
I was a mote of energy, a mote of light travelling for billions of years without moving, without experiencing time.
Now I die as matter so that I may become light again, as this thought comes to an end—with a poem that dies with it.
May they be flowers in the garden that you tend,
May they be vessels for the water that you choose,
May they be the soil that cradles both vessel and flower.
May they be the winds that blow the sails of my thoughts,
May they be loose ends of my ropes and their knots,
May they be the fabric for which sails, ropes and hours are woven
May they become the fabric of my time and my space,
May they be mine,
yet always about you.
Until it is Sunday again,
—Rene
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