There was nothing.
Then there was something.
It was a burning sensation. It felt localized but also everywhere; it incorporated or called on everything to work with it, like a conductor priming musicians to play. A point in the distance grew. It met with swirling colors of red and yellow and sometimes purple, and something that could have been noise if there were ears to hear it. But as of now, if there was even such a thing as now, this point was just a point and everything else just was.
Maybe this point was a large mountain in the distance with tall oaks criss-crossing it on the side that had the most sun and rain and large pocked rocks and snow on the other. So large, so immense that it didn't need a planet from which to form. It was itself a planet of two distinctive sides, floating silently along its gravitational path.
Maybe, instead, this point was just that: A mathematically created fiction where two axes met on graphing paper. Infinitely small but still real, as long as a mind was there to intuit it. There was no way to know what it was because there was nothing else besides it that had a form. No reference. It was the only thing there that wasn't a force, an act, a verb. A predicate without a subject.
The red began to undulate and swirl faster around this point. The pressure – there was now or always had been pressure – pulsed in a strange way. It was like water moving through an underground aquifer, gaining pressure as it flowed.
The reds and yellows combined and separated to some unknown pattern. Things in this odd world (or universe; there was no way to tell) were changing, growing. Something was happening. The trees on the warm side faded away; the snow became nothing or just went back to being nothing. The point contracted.
A feeling of loss entered the world. It was then replaced by an awareness that in order for a predicate to be a subject must be. The loss must come from somewhere. This thought didn't emanate from the point; that hypothesis only existed for as long as it took to form and then be discarded. Objects are known not by themselves, rather by or through others. A rock cannot know itself. The moss on its side, the little beetle making its way across, they know the rock.
The point expanded. Pressure increased. The reds and yellows of the world wrapped around the point, forming odd shapes that looked like petals that flared. The red, once only a dull metallic red of an old car door, darkened into that of almost something alive. The yellow, faint at first, grew stronger and brighter. Some strands of purple formed around the peripheral area, giving an edge to things in this place. It was, like the other colors, a thing that did not admit to a source. The deep bright red in an apple needs the apple; if you separate the redness from the apple, there would be no redness. Yet these colors seemed to be the source for themselves. Of what they were a reflection, when there was nothing to reflect in this place, this world?
I am feeling this / this is me. It was a mind; the mind felt no fear with its first words. If fear did exist in this world, it only existed long enough to vanish back into nothingness. It soon became apparent that this world was almost pure energy or emotion or thought. That little, if any of it, was form or matter or what was known as the world in the mind's past life. It had a past life; of that it was certain. But something happened to it and all that was left was this... sensation of heat and color and pressure. It felt hot as well. Yes. A burning too. But not pain. It was like touching ice. That rush that suffused the nerves and jarred the brain when suddenly forced into the afternoon chill of an unusually bright December day, where everything was snow and ice. Where everything glinted like diamond.
The colors, the pressure, all that was the world around the subject (If minds had a center) poured over the point now, and it grew. The petals flared, and the I was happy to exist again, to feel all of these sensations. It didn't know what was happening, or why, or what had become of the world before, but it knew that there was a beginning to this and knew that soon all of this would come to some sort of end. The swirling colors grew darker and pulsed as if it was separate from the rest of the world.
The miasma felt good. The mind, the I, was awash in sensations that reminded it of the other world, the world that was somehow gone. It was like a memory of something special and exciting. But it was different. It was purified. It operated on its own accord, via laws that were from the subject but were not controlled by it.
Sex.
An outside force. I am not alone.
