From Emptiness to Emptiness

I close my eyes and imagine the blanketed oceans, how they quaver beneath the starred sky. The sun hides coolly in the corner, overshadowed by the dull blink of the crushed moon, orbiting us like the rings of Saturn. Underwater, the sky burns red, and the world is, for a moment, still. Nothing is alive yet, except perhaps some bacteria. I wait. A meteor crashes into the ocean. Water shoots up around it, and then it’s swallowed into the emptiness. Another few billion years and the first, primitive animals will sputter into life. Brachiopods. Trilobites. Sea urchins. Will they love each other? Will they feel concern and worry and hatred? I can’t see their eyes, so I can’t know what’s inside them, but I like to think that I’d recognize something there; that, maybe, just maybe, I would see something in their eyes similar to my own, some glimmer of life to combat the emptiness of space, and the dark, young emptiness of the first ocean.