Approaching Zero

Upon this day he walks. Emptiness enshrouds his disembodiment like vortices of cool water softly spiraling in a wake. Each step belies an incredible weight, life, trembling beneath him. The ground, soft and marshy, barely feels a thing as he glides over its surface. He becomes as leaves gently tumbling in the breeze, traversing the mossy muck.

A doe stands motionless, dark eyes scanning the forest. Slowly she reaches her head down to a pool of water releasing her tongue into the cool murk, lapping it into her mouth. Instinct takes her over:

stop.

She closes her mouth and raises her head. With back muscles to provide the necessary tension, her neck retracts and breast extends. Her instinctual voice then returns:

behind.

The doe kicks out each hoof individually as she pirouettes to face her backside. Her eyes lock upon the flowing being.

in.

She stutters forward, alternating her hooves. Her head lightly dances with each progression.

stop.

Her feet sink into the soft floor, eyes locked to him. Ears flick about, listening. Her body still as her mind.

She can feel it. A tingling sensation in her nose that slowly traverses through the snout and into the face. Her lip muscles twitch, revealing glimpses of gum. Her teeth tap together as her jaw oscillates. Grinding the throat. A pulsating tongue applies pressure to any area of the mouth it can find contact with. She swallows nothing several times. Her nose in tandem with her jaw shakes side to side. As the buzzing reaches the back of her head, her neck muscles contract, her fur rippling like water.

Her whole body resonates with him.

Bliss.

With each wheezing breath, her skin bubbles. Entire sections loosen and slough off; scattered flesh reveals a shuddering musculature completely bare to the world. Rigid skeleton rooted like a tree, flopping muscle like a fish out of water. Her steady mind saturated in ecstacy.

Then, stillness.

She knows.

She realizes her being. What she once knew as herself is now other, something external to her experience.

He reaches the doe’s motionless mass as it begins to sublimate. He continues past her, trawling the physical with a swirling nothingness. Her various pieces begin to intermingle with it, bones, muscle, and blood becoming gaseous as they join his flow. Material in an infinite immaterial.

rest.

An empty rock; an empty world. He stands upon the day and upon the night.

A nonexistence lay draped around him, dangling. Light remaining unaware of its presence. The being removes it from its perch, and it starts to manifest temporally. The first light to interact with its surface betrays a perfect reflection in which none of the myriad photons lose any energy.

The object begins.

Its reflections describe an encompassed view of all that is. It is the form of everything. As the object narrows its view, it begins to reflect slower; manifesting over greater spans of time. Probabilities become few, and then unity.

Form.

A golden heart, reflecting now only the sunlight borne of the material world surrounding its metallic visage. A locket on a chain extending from finity to infinity.

Still the reflections slow.

The locket’s golden color reddens toward a hazy brown, and then an undefinable dark greyness as it consumes increasing amounts of photonic energy.

Singularity.

The exponential event approaches its limit. Light bounces like rain on a pond before coagulating and pooling onto the surface of the blackening locket. The liquid light swirls around rapidly forming an ocean with ever increasing density.

All light stops. Past and future calcify. Hanging in nowhere the locket compacts. Drinking them in, it diverts every potential future and material past to itself. Cutting away endless uncertainties it becomes certain.

All is the surface, bathing in the multitudinous.

Compacting under its own gravity, it forms rigid structures spanning the monstrous trenches of solidified time and light.

Holding it all,

upon the surface of the deep,

he hovers over the waters.