"Light likes to think it's the fastest thing around. Which it isn't. No matter how fast it travels, when it gets there it always finds the darkness got there first."
I really like the idea of it, but I'm not used to having a narrative structure like this. Any comments would be welcome, but silence is fine (just haven't posted on here since I was much younger
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The darkness was there first. It was a vacuum, an un-sensory aching, an unreachable agony. Without vibration in his still eardrums, the sound of it reached him; primitive shrieking. Or more of a primordial lowing; a horn; a low note on an obo; a long, deep sigh on a cello. Before life, there was an un-living. A knowing ran through his veins, that every ancestor before him had felt this emptiness and kept it clandestine, locked deep in what they believed was a soul. The infinite silence that came before the body, that lay beneath all matter and thought; the darkness, there before anything for it to consume.
Then came the mind, fragmented. Disconnected pieces, whole as they were, but incomplete together. There was movement. Without eyes he saw the fragments sparking, signalling. Electricity, powerless in an un-living, deconstructed brain. This was physics; his mind was chemistry and physics. Not thoughts, not emotions, not consciousness.
Then came the cold; an awareness of a lack. At first it was the cold of the body, and he was, fleetingly, matter in the universe. Then the lacking grew, the existential temperature reduced to the coldness of oblivion. Hovering, he turned over and felt the cold whoosh of the abyss.
Suddenly, he shifted. He entered his body, and contracted his limbs in toward the little warmth of his core. The world moved around him. Pebbles tumbled and grated. Cold, hard lumps under his cold, fading body. He was here.
Then came sound. An echo on repeat – and other bodies! sending the vibrations, other individuals of matter and might, of sight and touch and hearing. He could smell salt. Out of oblivion, some time past, water had poured and made a sea, something had set in stone. The stars grew above – and here, a memory! Seagulls soaring across each other’s paths, dancing, lit from underneath by bright lights. They looked like shooting stars, too close; an inter-galactic battle. War – and the moon pulled the tide, ripped it up by the hair and threw it roaring onto stone. The stone shattered and the waves repented, soothed away the edges of pebbles. He could hear the ebbing now – with his ears.
The smell of salt was cleansing. He had grown a palate. Another body moved through his hair – pressure on his brain – he felt the basic binary pair, pleasure and pain, and didn’t like it. He didn’t like the nausea rising either, or the worry that his heart wasn’t beating. He was on the brink of life, abyss on either side. He remained, and that notion, derived from the distance of matter, time, must have passed. It must because he existed now, and so did destiny.
He felt gratitude. The other bodies felt compassion. He rose to speak, because he felt compassion too.
His first words came: a warning. Swiftly, he pressed his palms against the shingle and spread them apart, creating a bowl out of fragments of rock. It surged upwards, from the core and forced out into space. He heard a splashing, a splattering and felt relief. Another body swept the stones across his vomit. He learnt to feel shame.
He drifted again, hanging over oblivion, he followed the rhythms of the tide (he hoped it would not surge up the shore and enclose him). But now, he was grounded. His whole body was pressed to the shingle. But the fear stayed with him that the gravity would go, and he, the others, and the small, round bodies of stone would fall slowly, agonisingly, terribly into darkness.
Light likes to think it travels fastest of all. But no matter how fast it travels, it finds that darkness got there first.
