Atoms to Atoms

She is lying on a pool of starlight, spinning out into a vast blackness, punctured here and there by pin pricks of silver that glitter and twinkle. Patches of rolling gases, burning green and red and the deepest hues of blue that are just two shades above black, drift by. Overhead, streaks of gold and silver intertwine and weave about, crossing the sky with their patterns.

She sits up, slowly, and looks around.

There is a woman sitting there, her eyes a supernova and the rebirth of a star, her shining lips the dawning of creation. Her skirts spiral into eternity, melting into the black void of forever, and she strokes a spiral galaxy like a cat. "Hello," she says.

She says nothing as she looks around. She can see, very far away, a planet being sucked into a black hole, and she watches as it is torn to pieces, ripped to shreds. She tries to get to her feet, only to look down and discover she is already standing, although she has no memory of moving. She knows it cliché, but says,
"Where am I?"

"Your remaking," the woman says, gently pushing the galaxy off her lap and nudging in the direction of the millions of other glittering galaxies, circling in the vastness of the universe. She turns and examines her, nodding thoughtfully. "I think some of you will be remade into the child who will grow up to solve world hunger," she says pensively, "Or maybe a tree. Or a cat – a nice one, with a pink collar who will purr when you scratch it under the chin. Which would you prefer?"

She stares at the woman with the death and the creation of everything painted on her face, and says, "My what?"

"Oh my dear…you can't possibly think that your atoms belong to just you, can you?" The woman clucks her tongue, shakes her head, and begins to circle her, looking her up and down critically. "You were part of a planet once, but it was destroyed when its sun blew up," she says abruptly. "You were one of the first cells to ever start twitching and moving with a purpose, in that putrid, poisonous sea beneath the sky of fire. You were a part of the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs, and you were a triceratops. Five hundred million of your atoms were once a part of Jeanne d'Arc, and before that, you were a peasant boy who starved to death during a particularly bad winter. You were a plant that got eaten by a cow that your father ate when he was nineteen, drunk and absolutely starving. You were a mosquito that drowned in the soup your mother drank a week before you ever were even a thought. You were the match that burned down your grandmother's house, and a part of the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln."

She stops, leans in, and smiles. Her smile promises salvation, but not the kind you can expect to find in a church. Her saving is the kind that comes from lying on a rooftop in summer with a star chart and a telescope and friends who complain that they're cold, with all of forever and eternity sparkling overhead.

"You are everything," she says, "And nothing at all. You are meaningless, in the face of everything that has happened and is happening at this very moment and ever will happen, and yet…" she pauses here, and her fingers, cool and gentle, trail up and down her face, "And yet…you are one of the most perfect things I have ever created."

"I do not understand," she whispers, dying stars and burning super giants catching her eyes.

The woman smiles sadly, and somewhere, a star expands, swallows a planet whole, extinguishes any sign of life. "No one ever does. But I don't understand, either, so it works out in the end."

She leans in, impossibly close, shining with something so much grander than she could have ever dreamed of, and says, "It is time to be remade, my darling."

"I'm scared," she breathes, shaking so hard that she feels like she will fly into a thousand pieces from the force of it, shatter apart like a bottle dropped onto the kitchen floor.

"You should not be," the woman tells her, her voice a promise that can never be truly broken. "You will live forever. You will burn as stars, die as men. You will destroy planets and create stories that last eternity as legends, if not as fact." Her smile is very gentle, and warm. "You will exist as a thousand and five things, my dear, and you should not be afraid."

Her eyes flicker shut and she breathes in the airless atmosphere.

The woman leans in, her skirts rustling quietly, and presses her lips to her forehead, soft as a feather, hotter than the big bang.

Spiraling out from the point where those burning lips touched, she cracks, right down to her molecules – hydrogen and carbon and nitrogen, all separating. She breaks down the middle, splits in two, then flies apart into a thousand, a million, a billion, a trillion smaller and smaller pieces, all hanging in the still, silent air, until they are beyond even the most powerful eyes or the strongest of microscopes. She laughs as she falls to pieces, as she is torn apart – a wild free sound, ripped from her, joyful and ecstatic as her parts are spread apart to the cosmos.

The universe watches, smiling her sad little smile as she lets out one last whoop and breaks apart completely. Then, the universe gathers the handful of particles that remain up in her hands, pulls her needle and threads from her pocket, and begins to sew.