In The Beginning

In the beginning, there must have been light. This light was invisible, but everyone and everything could feel it, and it was joy and bitterness and hunger and fullness and boredom and fear and infatuation and peace. The light was the way you feel when you eat a sandwich on Tuesday, and it was also the way you feel right before you get sick. It was the sixth time you’ve bumped you toe on the same corner of the bedstead in the middle of the night. The light was the taste of pineapple lollipops, it was misdirected anger, it was unexpected kindness, it was love. It was not hate. But it was everything else.

And because the light was everything, and everything was the light, the beginning was also confusion and chaos, and so the things in the universe developed ways to filter the light, and then ways to reflect it back at each other, and in this way a particular emotion or experience could be remembered and shared at will with any other part of the universe. This became communication.

It started with the stars. Being the largest things there were, the stars got more of the light than any of the smaller objects, and after a while, all of the hope and despair, and the smell of baking bread, and the heat of warm baths, and the shimmer of gasoline in small dirty, puddles, and the excitement of traveling on a jet plane became too much for the stars, and they turned themselves inside out. Now everything that had come in shot right back out, and inside it was dark and quite. This is how the stars became the most selfless things in the universe, giving without ever taking, and it is why today people make wishes on them. However it also meant that the stars were no longer able to absorb light, and that’s why the wishes seldom come true, because they can’t hear us, no matter how hard we try.

After this, there came color, because color reflected some things while letting others through. And by becoming a certain color, an object could reflect something for everything around it, and any time someone looked at the object, they absorbed whatever the object was reflecting, and in this way, there was communication.

Still the light was too much, and so next to come were hardness and softness and squishiness and stickiness, and a whole universe of other textures that deflected or accepted the stronger forms of light, like a door slammed on your finger, or a hand held for the first time in the back row of the movies.

And now they could communicate and share, and they could order the chaos and sort out the confusion. But everything was not perfect. Because when an object chose to take on colors and texture, when it decided to reflect something to the world, it found that now it could only absorb the opposite. When a flower chose as its color perfect happiness, it gave off happiness to everything around it, but it could only absorb sadness in return.

For this reason, things in the universe found it prudent to make colors that were not pure, but mixtures of many different things, becoming, for example, green, which is newness and power and promise, but also illness and jealousy and pride, or red, which is love and warmth and confidence, but also anger and warning and embarrassment. And in this way they might give off happiness and absorb sadness, but because the color was only a small part happiness, they might still hope to absorb some when it was given off by a friend.

With these mixed colors, things got confusing again, because no one could tell whether someone who was, for example, red, wished to project love or anger or heat or scratchiness or the thrill of beating the high score on the pinball machine at the crowded arcade on the boardwalk, or perhaps something else entirely. So the next thing to be created was sound, which was like a secondary filter. And now with sound, the red thing could crackle and pop, and every one would know that it was fire, and something that was green could say “I am envious” and everything around it would know that it was not growing, or, if it was growing, that that was incidental, the important part being the envy.

Of course, of all the objects in the universe, only one kind of object was so worried about this communication that it made itself black and white and brown and beige and tan so that it could reflect a little bit of all the colors (and absorb them too) and it invented clothes and accessories, which were colored things that could be put on and taken off at a moment’s notice, and it thought up a million different sounds to make and called them words or songs or giggles or cries. And these objects, that were called people, were so confusing in their many colors that they began to rely on the words and sounds to communicate with each other.

Now, the more they relied on these fragile secondary filters, the farther away they got from the stronger forms of light, like touch, which became frightening to the people, who mostly tried to avoid them. In fact, they became so worried about what they were reflecting to the rest of the universe, that they developed mirrors, which would reflect everything and absorb nothing. With the mirrors the people thought that they could see how they would be received by the objects around them, but they forgot that communication is about what is absorbed, not what is reflected, and that a mirror could not tell you how another part of the universe would absorb a touch or a sound, or what parts of you they would in turn reflect and not absorb.

Having never before encountered something as absolute as the mirror, no one could know that when they invented it, they would inadvertently invent the feeling of hate. Hate is a perfect reflection without any absorption. It is the denial of communication. This is why people often feel sad when they look in a mirror. But when people thought about the mirror, they had a great realization, which was that if something could perfectly absorb everything that you reflected, it would create the opposite of hate. Immediately the people wanted to believe in this opposite of hate, and so they agreed to name it in order to make it more real. But because the people hadn’t found this anti-mirror and so had never experienced this feeling, they could only imagine what it might be like, and they called it love, even though that already meant something, because it was the best thing they could think of. Then they thought about it some more and decided that this was not strong enough, and so they called it being in love, because it would be like existing in a world where only the very best and happiest light surrounded you at all times. And they were certain that all they had come up with must be true, because they had experienced hate.

As soon as they had discovered this, the people ran out to try and find this anti-mirror in the world. It would have to be very complex, they thought, in order to absorb all of the many different things that each of them reflected, and they searched high and low but could not find it in beautiful paintings, which had many different colors, or in diamonds and jewels, which fascinated many of the searchers because they were translucent and could absorb and reflect at the same time. Still others insisted that they could create the anti-mirror by collecting a group of things which, together, would be able to absorb all of a person, and they set off in search of all the things they would need, but they could never quite find enough of them. Finally, some of the people stopped searching and angrily returned to the mirror, convinced that the secret lay with in it, but there they found only hate, and sat for a long time but could not free themselves.

At this point, the remaining searchers, who had been searching together for a long time now, were very tired, but not yet ready to give up, and so they turned to each other as though to ask the person next to them what they thought might be answer. And since it had been many years and they had used everything they knew of to try to figure out the answer, many of the searchers had used up all of their words and had none left to give to the person they were looking at. And over the long journey much of their clothing had faded, and their accessories had been lost, and they had nothing to reflect colors at the person, not even to give them the general sense of excitement and queasiness that’s reflected by a pair of striped earrings, or moisture and disparity from a paisley tie, or that exhaustion tinged with the sour aftertaste of gooseberry berry jam, for which tangerine swim trunks seemed to be most effective. Many of them then remembered the stronger forms of light, and fighting broke out between some who used their arms and legs to express their despair or frustration, and others tried pressing different parts of their bodies together, touching each other in every way they could think of, and it was pleasant indeed, so for a while they called this making love, but nothing much came of it after all, except to distract them from their search for the anti-mirror. The few who remained didn’t know what to try anymore, so they just looked around, and tried to guess what someone else was thinking.

All of a sudden, one of these last people cried out.

“I have found it!” he said. And everyone around him hurried over crying “Where? Where is it?” but all they saw was a girl sitting on a rock a short distance away.

“It’s right here,” he said, and they looked at him, but he was staring at the girl.

“It’s her,” he said, and his voice was hushed and reverent. But the others looked at her and they did not see it. Slowly they all turned away in disappointment, but in the darkness came another voice.

“No! It’s him! It’s him!” cried a woman, and “Quickly, come and see!”

But when they reached the source, still the group did not see it, and they were again disappointed. “We don’t see anything,” they said, but the man whom the woman had pointed at stood up and shook his head.

“That’s because it’s not me, it’s him,” he said, and with this he pointed at a man nearby, the very one who had occupied his attention.

The crowd looked and looked again with each new shout, but each time they were disappointed because now matter how certain the person who shouted, they could never seem to agree on any one source.

“It must be someone,” an old man reasoned. “It only makes sense that the one thing complex enough to absorb us is something as complex as we are! It must be one of us! Everyone look for him!”

And with considerable fervor the whole group set out to look for the person who would absorb everything of them, the one who would bring them to the light. At this there was much confusion, because everyone seemed to have a different idea about who it might be. And sometimes the crowd would agree on one particular person, and they would exult that person above all else and say that they were sent from the Light as it originally was, and they would capitalize the “L”, meaning that light of the Beginning (which, being in the Middle, they would also capitalize), but they were forgetting that originally the Light contained bad things as well as good and that they were each a part of the Light, but that they had mostly forgotten this fact in their search. So they could never seem to say definitively that they had found what they were looking for.

Still, as the crowd passed by, two people remained, smiling and facing each other, and they did not leave with the rest.

“Why didn’t you leave with them?” asked the girl.

“Why, because I know they won’t believe me,” said the boy, “but I’ve found it. And so I just thought I’d stay here with it as long as I could.”

“I knew it!” said the girl, “because I’ve found it too!”

“Yes,” said the boy. Then, “It’s you.” And he smiled at her.

But the girl frowned at him.

“No,” she said.

“No?” he asked, alarmed.

“No,” she said firmly. “It’s you.”

And for a little while they argued, but neither of them could be swayed. And in the end, it didn’t matter. Both had found what they were looking for, and rather than risk losing it, they decided to stop arguing and let the other believe what they wanted as long as they might stay with them. And for the first time since the stars turned themselves inside out, something in the universe remembered what it was like to absorb the Light as it was in the Beginning, and because they were too busy holding on to it to figure out what exactly it was, they continued to call it being in love, and this led to even more confusion and chaos in the world for which the people needed more words and songs and clothes and accessories, but sorting this out gave them something to do while they were searching, and so they didn’t much mind it at all.