After the Big Bang

Then, I was awake.

Once adjusted to the ominous black, I gazed upon pinpricks of white: some far away and others like neighbours. Yes, in the beginning, the galaxy did not feel like a solitary place. Time was washed away by peering into the stars, marvelling. Each rotation displayed a new angle, a new perspective on the inky garden I was anchored to. The blazing petals stood against the heavy atmosphere – was it oppressing? No, it was simply there, just surrounding us in a sea of nothing.

I did not notice change until I began to sweat rivers. They tricked around my spherical form; the atmosphere-of-nothing preventing the torrents from falling below. Water pooled and swelled like a star about to erupt.

And, in response, ulcers began to bulge, hot and sore, filling with the pulsating orange blood. When one did seep, the wax trickled; crusting, creating moles of rocks. Other lingered on, shifting in the oceans, as I broke up.

I was forming: becoming a world.

Soon, ticks niggled at my scalp, now split into woven islands. They developed alongside I, conjoining and recalculating, until they inhabited my whole body. Some would patter along my forehead, while others tangled into trees, or rode upon pinched mountains. Some floated like I in the seas, sinking into embedded pores, unaware of the blistering of my molten blood.

Their eyes consumed the atmosphere – as I did when first conceived – while I blew air in circulations, as they prayed for breath. Some invented night and day, which merely passed me by with each, lumbering pirouette. They could see what I first witnessed, as they stumbled into life and death.

For I was a God, a life source to those who pranced upon my watery skin.

I was Earth.

Written after inspiration from Sharon Olds' poem 'First Hour'