We didn’t know where we came from. We never used to think about purpose or destruction, beauty or brevity. All we knew was the universe’s answers. We have watched stars explode into another cycle of being, seen the bottoms of black holes and have observed life fester on planets only to disappear just as quickly as it began.

We had no place to call our own. Or, rather we thought of no such thing as ownership, all we knew was the span of inky space between stars and the strength of our bodies that would carry us through our journey to an end that was just as mysterious as our beginnings. We were beings, and nothing else, so it goes.

But, that all began to change when we came across a mysterious thing as we glided through the void of space. It was not uncommon for crumbled rocks or alien objects to float around the magnetic pull of their once home planets, but what we found that day was much too far away from a planet to be immediately claimed as debris from it.

We all saw it, but only some of us wished to investigate. Some of us pulled away to look while others continued through the existing path. The thing some of us journeyed through was smaller than most things that floated in the dark, but it was big enough for the some of us who were encouraged by something unknown to explore it. We who remained felt the change of our bodies as they connected with the surface, the unknown feeling that urged us to come made us all want to leave just as quickly. A few did leave, but most of us stayed.

The object was unnaturally easy for us to get into, its intended purpose seemingly ended like a planet that pulls itself apart in its cycle of purpose. Except the purpose of this object was unfulfilled. We sensed it, the bulky thing affected the space around us, it made everything feel more than we had ever felt before. It was a new feeling, a feeling that some of us would end up calling failure. This was an object of some planet’s virus of life, space had ended its unknown purpose by existing more.

We recognized the objects failure to exist, and called it place. Even though those that called it their own were long gone themselves, floating in space; unlike us they were unable to observe anymore. Despite its hollow existence, the gone species left such oddities for us to find.

There were tiny pieces of pressurized minerals made into distinct shapes that spiraled around and around itself as if it was in orbit, but the only thing it orbited was itself- a tiny paradox. Some of us now felt need, a hole that we did not know we had inside us demanded it be blocked, so we opened ourselves and ate the paradox. It filled us with the realization of more nothing and we needed more nothing.

We opened small spaces and discovered more questions. We found an object that did not match the appearance of the darkness or anything else. It showed us a past that never was. We did not create a past for ourselves until that object. The object was flat and shimmered, it made us want to move, but not forward to our unknown purpose but small movements to reflect a past of feelings we had not felt, when they existed. We swayed and orbited one another in tiny circles as we experienced our first sense of pleasure. Pleasure was a perfect unreal memory, but it was one we would strive to create again.   

I found something. It was not a tasty paradox or an unreal memory, it was something I was not meant to understand. Hidden under one of the place’s many rest areas, the new object was thin but multi-layered, like the many surfaces a planet goes through in its process of creation. In a way, the thin object was like a planet but much smaller, one that focused on creatures with secret nebulas to expose, nearly round black holes, and colliding planets held frozen in time by force.  These sights introduced us to difference, a nova that cleaved new found emotions apart. They did not like it.

I tried to convince them to stay but they refused. I begged them to re-consider but they decided theirs was a being that must feel everything or nothing as one, that is what kept us on our path of all answers and no questions. I begged them to allow the place to exist but they all agreed that since it was bonded and connected by paradoxes, it was right to absorb it and leave nothing behind.

I was left alone floating in space, with new feelings and questions that I was never supposed to have. As I clung to that flat layered planet that caused so much harm, I realized that I was an alien species of one.

I am to be called Ego, and I ask and answer my own questions.

Photo: Greg Rakozy