Chapter 1 

I was contained in something, that’s one thing the Presence said to me. In fact I was contained in many things and they were not symmetrical by any means. It was as though if I felt along the contours of what contained me I could stick some memory in my head and keep it there, a virgin memory so to speak. My first memories in the universe! But they were generated by a kind of intuitive feelings along these containers or contours that could be rounded, or sharp, occasionally as thin as a hair and long, so long it seemed to me days even weeks before I slipped out into another container. And what was a day or week in this place? It was non-existent. It literally didn’t matter whether it was a day or year, a thousand years. I had lost my orientation. What was time to me or to what contained me?

I saw no sun. I saw horizons. I kept looking for a sky to comfort me, to orientate me but there was nothing. I began to partition what I saw using whatever dot or flash was apparent to me to, at least, provide boundaries. It helped. Oh sun I used to say to myself old friend good old light you taught us everything, you were the father of us, you put yourself in us from the beginning and we walked with you inside us and were giddy for the friendship of you, sun.

I noted the stunning silence after every thought I had along those lines. It was silly to sing of the sun as a being but why not? It was the indifference to my little chants and whimsical thoughts that always got to me. Well, who am I to disturb this blasted place? Who I am to sing to you I said? I was a mere sport of nature and I was missing very little back on Earth and was probably being missed little in turn. It did cross my mind a few times. “Do they know I’ve been taken in this way? Perhaps even been chosen for some great project we can’t figure out yet?” They get up, go to the patio, look for me, I’m not there. They are jolted at first, I’m sure of it. But then they begin to see the advantage of me not being there. How much easier life is without me in the way. And I suppose I was a kind of jagged edge at times. They would look and holler my name and then go back inside and close the curtains, the brown ones that hadn’t been changed in fifty years and write a note to themselves to notify the cops I was missing or had run away. And they always believed I was going to run away and get away from them but that was never my intention. I rather liked the group and the patio and trees.

I have been declared dead I decided. I knew them so well. And here is where my knowledge of physics came into play. I knew all this time/space continuum stuff and that if I went in the speeds I thought I had been going then thousands of years would have passed on Earth. It would be a dark creature now. I wouldn’t want to return. I made it very clear to myself that I didn’t want to see that far ahead because I knew I would have no place there in fact, would go crazy trying to adjust to whatever humans had concocted. Maybe time was only a huge adumbration breaking down what thought was permanent and then making the impermanent the real thing that became forever. So each generation, if they had generations, would destroy the previous one in anticipation or, really, as a duty to the permanent impermanence. And then I would squeal in laughter and leave off for awhile.

David Eide
January 24, 2014