The Bones Of Gravity

"Is everything alright?" she called from the portal.  "What do you see?"

There was a long pause and then a voice answered as if from very far away.  "No time!"

"What?" she replied, confused.

"No time here!"  The familiar voice stretched thin as if being carried away on the Doppler effect of a retreating ambulance.

"What does it look like?" she asked in a loud shout, to be heard through the strong interference between dimensions.

"Come see for yourself!"

And so Melissa raised herself up from the floor and began to insert herself into the over-head portal in all its blackness.  The portal absorbed her mass and she became lighter and lighter until she could simply pull the lower half of her body up with nothing at all to grasp for leverage.

Once inside the portal, blackness began to thin into grey and shapes came into view, slightly at first.  The sensation was a mix of eyes adjusting to both pitch black and bright sunlight and the pressure of diving into deep water combined with the lightheadedness of high altitude.  Warmth and cold were at odds within her, searching for equilibrium.

And then, the most unexpected sensation overtook her with equal parts terror and thrill.  Melissa began to feel pulling in all directions.  Up, down, left, right.  Inside and out.  Forward and back.  She was slowly becoming aware that her body and her mind were loosening their bonds.  She felt diluted.  The space between her cells invaded and pushed apart.  Her thoughts intermingle with others, inserting words that made panic seem impossible, regardless of how appropriate it be at the present.  The orbital paths of her electrons were intersected by vast galactic clusters and in very little time she became aware that, indeed, as Stan had said, there was no time here.

As she began to imagine Stan, he was there, within her and the vastness.  She felt him like a drop of whiskey in a cup of tea, spread thin but there nonetheless.  She tried to talk to him but it became unnecessary as she knew him now, as she knew all things now.  Inquiry had no value here.  There was only To Be and so that is what they did.

Direction and shape were fuzzy and tended to circle in upon themselves, making it difficult to explain, other than to say that it was simple and elegant and made all previous descriptions unsatisfactory, if not outright wrong.  It was not that this place existed outside time.  This place contained all things and all things existed outside time.  The matrices of gravitational wells scattered and swirled like steam bubbles in water.  And they created no paths for orbit as in her other world.

In this place, in this Now, with the fallacy of time stripped away like a warped lens, everything was as it should be and all natural laws co-existed without conflict because they were all now part of a single and universal law.  Energy can not be created nor lost because it is all right here, together.  Where would it go that the circular shaped would not bring it right back around?  All things exist outside of time but some require the removal of time to become detectable.  Stars are not eternal fusion engines, churning along slowly, consuming and expelling.  They are dense gravitational bubbles blasting to the surface, releasing all their energies at once.

This is what they knew and the knowledge spread through the universe like pleasure through the nervous system, touching every sub-atomic particle at once and together they cried in a great awe of the completeness of it all and the tears were rain upon the fabric of space, commingling with the bright, dense stars. And steam rose and stars flashed, heavily pregnant with love.  And the wholeness of the system churned on and on and the two, who had become part of the ONE, contemplated leaving but were quite aware that the circular nature of direction and shape would bring them right back around.

Indeed, had always brought them right back around.

She settled back, quite comfortable in this, their place, and began to sing.  The strings of the timeless universe vibrated under her instruction and peeled like church bells across the infinite, riding the bones of gravity and came right back around, carrying with them the very first and only thought that has ever been.