Slowly—ever so slowly—it all began to turn to dust.
It started in the fields. She almost could have missed the whole event, prancing in the meadow as she was; one in her position could not help but gaze in upward bliss at the hues of saffron and rose and lavender that bloomed across the setting skies. She leapt up with glee, relishing in how the gentle plush of the grass caught her fall and seemed to propel her ever higher and higher and higher, oblivious to the fine trails of ash that lay in her wake. Just as she was about to burst into a full gallop with the immensity of it all, she—and this was her folly—glanced down upon herself, promptly stumbling over her two left feet.
She landed flat on her face with a muted thump! and a grayish puff swept a cloud of particulates into her eyes and her mouth. For a moment, all she could manage to do was lie in a daze. The sky tumbled and churned in great circles overhead. In the still of her stupor, the dust finally settled to the earth—and only then did she attempt to blindly grasp around her for some bare modicum of sense. She tore up a clenched fist full of grass-blades and splayed it open to a poof.
Her spine stiffened and she shot upwards in shock. She could now see clearly the ripples of soot that streaked her wayward path through the field. She hobbled to her feet, with a half-hope that the higher vantage point would dispel the irregular scene, but the only thing she now grasped was just how deeply the blemished veins ran.
She began to feel a chill. In the dying light, she could spot others in the distance—a couple intertwined, a flock of friends in celebration, a child and a dog—but she could detect in none of their silhouettes any sign of the icy panic that now inched and nestled deep into her bones.
What’s happening to me?
She fled, homeward bound, not daring to glance down at the clouds of dust that smoked from her staggering gait. She collapsed against her doorway, fumbling with the lock, and finally broke into the room with a haggard leap. She turned and barricaded the door, one, two, three, and shuttered the blinds in a vehement clap.
By now it was night, her room cold and pitch black. She couldn’t bring herself to flip on the ceiling light, fearing the scene that it might reveal, and instead lit a candle with a match and a hissss. The flame flickered precariously. Overcome by a morbid curiosity, she peered into a mirror.
A distorted figure leered back. This creature was so foreign to her, and impossibly distant, as though the glass had severed the image’s tether to reality in one cold stroke. Trembling, she brought her hand to caress its face with what she thought was truth—was that a moment of pause? She ran her fingers down its body. It felt so strange, so grotesque; her consciousness hung to it by a mere thread.
Everything was in its wrong place. Was her own flesh and bone, too, fading away? She began to gasp for certainty as her rib cage spasmed and contorted in her sickly reflection. The left side of her mouth drooped before her eyes. The asymmetry was nauseating. A shaky inhale rattled her frame, and she coughed.
Why a cough?
She tore her gaze from the mirror image. The walls around her were crumbling. Plumes of dust grasped for and choked the air, and her breath caught on a blade.
No, please, not again—
She threw herself to the floor, sobbing, using spit and tears and blood and snot in her desperation to plaster together the splitting walls, smearing the paste over the fractaling gaps—but how insurmountably wide they were—and the more fiercely she scraped and prayed and clawed to piece them back together, the faster the earthy substance disintegrated under her fingertips. The worst became undeniably, horrifically true: this ruin was her own doing.
There was no shield from the world now. As far as one’s eye could discern, all structure and form and shelter had crumbled away. A bare existence lay strewn on its remains. She numbed herself to the ground, rocking back and forth, humming and humming a hope into the ether,
is anyone there?
Was she even sure that there was ever someone there? Was it always just dust?
A piercing tone began to fade in and out of her wavering perception. Through her tear-stricken eyes she could barely make out the constellations overhead—but she fastened the last of her hopes to them, spinning her around and around in their celestial dance. In this great whirling, it all soon felt just like a dream…
Then, one by one, a light was extinguished from the heavens and fell towards the earth.
Thump. thump. thump. Each speck of stardust thumped like thunder, echoing and booming in her ears. But she felt nothing; in her numbness she lay dormant as the dust made hilltops and peaks and valleys and caverns of her body. A muted thought washed over her of how many stars had once littered the skies and how much there was left to fall. The showering turned into a torrential downpour. She waited for it to consume her.
But then some visceral thing erupted—some primal frenzy to persist, to not be buried in this—and she began to claw upwards through the endless mounds, tearing at them with limb over limb in her struggle to stay afloat, so unsure of where her body ended and the dust began—maybe she was losing herself to it—and it scorched her lungs as she labored for each gasp of air, stopping her heart—
And she hit a wall.
There was no space left to go. The dust compacted inward, becoming ever more dense, splaying whatever remained of her being against this dome that immobilized her. She was being compressed by nothing into nothing, nothing, nothing…
But just as she was fading away, from all directions, came a resounding golden chord!
I Am!
Answering the call, she pushed blindly into the impasse—
—and it burst open, flinging her far out into a void, beyond the known, cast forth on a free-fall into a vast expanse of potentialities; she saw in a dizzy splendor the tendrils of matter that blossomed outwards from the rupture of her cage, and the patterns of chaos and cosmos that intertwined in a kaleidoscopic dance.
And then, in a speck of dust that chanced to float her by… she saw the Universe entire. She couldn’t help but laugh.