It is beginning, and it is ending.
It is breathing, living, existing, and it is choking, dying, fading away.
A great cosmic beast with its million eyes that take a thousand years to blink, never more than one blinking at a time, its rumbling song unbearable to hear yet so alluring, so enticing its maddening. Its thousand hearts beat in synchronicity, a boom that echoes through space, unable to be heard but felt, a bone rattling sucker punch to the gut.
It watches you, screaming and writhing, as it watches – has watched, will watch – everything else. The universe cracks apart with its smile, a jagged, brilliant gash of light across the darkness.
"It won't be long."
It starts to fade away, like a whale submerging back under the water after taking a breath, and you're already forgetting what it looked like. Its song is growing quiet, and you struggle to hear the last note, but it never comes. Your bones settle, your breath comes back to you, and you let lose one last wail into the void, a lamentation for the perfect horror.
You're supposed to forget about it. Supposed to never remember the beast made of stardust and supernovas.
You can't forget it at all.
You become nocturnal, as you get older. You can't fall asleep at night, too preoccupied staring out into the sky stretching above you, searching frantically for it. You can't hold down a relationship, and eventually you stop trying. Your parents worry, as parents do, but eventually they except that their only child is happy as he is, and stop pushing their friends' children at him.
You dream about blinding lights and lightless voids, of cold comets and burning stars. You float through the rings of Saturn and yell into the great storm of Jupiter. You see planets circling stars unfathomable distances away from Earth, full of life and death. You watch stars engulf planets and then collapse in on themselves, too greedy to continue existing.
You bury your mother when you're sixty-two, and your father when you're sixty-two and a half. You cry throughout the day and into the night both times, and you think you hear a familiar song behind you, quiet as though it was playing in a far away room, but it could very easily be your own sobs echoing through the empty house.
Ninety-three years after you don't forget those awful, wonderful first fifteen minutes of life, surrounded by cold white walls and cold white machines, you feel your bones start to ache, not with arthritis as they had been for the last twenty or so years, but with an unforgettable rattle. You might be crying, watching as the ceiling you've stared at for the last two weeks crumble away into the emptiness, as a million eyes burn into you. There's a hum reverberating in your chest, bumping against ribs and muscle to make room for itself. A rumble nearly splits your eardrums, a crescendo you've been waiting to hear since the moment you were born.
"Welcome back."
From the prompt: The reason babies cry when they're born is because for the first fifteen minutes of life, everyone is aware of everything that has been, is, or will be in the universe, which is more than the human brain can handle and the most common response is general screaming. Write about those fifteen minutes.
