[Dedicated to George Shears, a faraway friend whose brilliant beacon guided me ashore when I was lost upon a sea of emptiness amid a storm of rumination.]

For the first time in years I didn’t want to die. The world was ending.

Any day now. That’s what the intermittent broadcasts on the old mountain radio were saying. Any day now the planet’s entire magnetosphere would be stripped away by an unprecedented solar storm. The flares would rage on thereafter, scorching the surface of the Earth, erasing everything that ever was.

Like many who had come to loath their own kind, I might have rejoiced if it were just us wretched apes being wiped off the face of the Earth. But it was going to be the lot. Every animal, every tree, every fish in the sea. The entire biosphere, singed to dust and soot. The atmosphere was to be blown away, the oceans were to be boiled off, and even the crust itself was to be burnt deeper than the dwelling of any lifeform. The planet might see life again one day, but it wouldn’t be for a long, long time.

It seemed like the greatest loss imaginable, and I felt like I ought to care, but I did not. All that concerned me was that I had been cheated.

Launching myself from a clifftop or chugging a fistful of sleepers – these options had been a comfort to me throughout my lifelong despair. I had poised myself on the precipice of oblivion, unflinching in my indecision, committing neither to death nor to life. That power had given me a modicum of control, allowing me to keep my wits and avert the worst disaster of all: Madness.

But not anymore, not since they declared the end of the fucking world.

The universe was laughing at me. I’d been stripped of my only power, the power that kept my sanity intact. Suicide seemed premature and even more futile now that absolute finality was looming. I could only take my life out of a sense of urgency, to meet death before it met me. But by a sick twist of fate, I’d somehow lost the will to die.

I scolded myself – I ought to be relieved that it’d all be over soon. And I wouldn’t even have to confront the grisly nature of self-destruction. It was a blessing. So why did I now want to live?

Perhaps it was the overwhelming sense of doom that jolted a response from somewhere deep inside: Because my questions hadn’t yet been answered…

***

I stood at the edge of Big Bluff in the scenic reserve a few hours out of town, or, what had once been town. It was a vertical drop to nothing but jagged annihilation, a bottomless gloom disappearing beneath the forest canopy. I had come here often over the years to remind myself that I could take the leap if ever my existential grief became too much to bear. I’d been camped up alone in the old ranger’s hut for the past few weeks, ever since… the news. Nothing but trees and mountains for miles – my home if I ever had such a thing.

The vista had always been pleasant from up on Big Bluff, but was now wholly spectacular with the furious purple-green aurora dancing in the clear star-speckled sky, heralding Armageddon. It was midnight, but the forested expanse might as well have been lit by half-a-dozen fiery full moons. Not a bad send-off, I supposed.

“Salutations!” bellowed a thunderous voice from behind.

I spun around and instinctively collapsed to my knees, vertigo yanking at my spine.

I screamed. Incoherent profanity.

My heart jetted rocket-fuel through my veins. I scrambled away from the cliff edge on all fours and threw my fists into the air in an instinctive attempt to defend myself. My eyes blinked repeatedly to sharpen the view of the figure who had suddenly appeared behind me in the middle of nowhere.

The pinkish glow of the aurora illuminated the face of… God?

“Oowoop,” cooed the wavy-haired, silver-bearded man towering over me. “I extend to you my sincerest apologies for having startled you, fellow person!” He gathered his layers of loose robes and dropped into a gracious bow.

His low jovial voice eased my nerves enough for me to realise how absurd I must have appeared squatting awkwardly on the ground with bent fists at the ends of joint-locked arms aimed skywards. I stood up as coolly as possible and brushed the dirt from my pants, cleared my throat, and took a few extra precautionary steps away from the bluff.

“You… You really gave me a fright,” I panted to the man, who was still doubled over in a deep bow, his wavy hair touching the ground.

When he erected himself fully, my stomach twisted into a knot. The man was a giant. At least eight feet tall. “I’ve been told I need to work on my sneakiness.” He frowned and nodded. “It’s a genuine problem.”

My head spun. I couldn’t comprehend this man’s bizarre attire and enormous stature, let alone how and why he had suddenly appeared here, far from anywhere, at the end of the world. His accent was muddled and his ageless olive skin and bright contrasting eyes further obscured his origin.

“Ah, what are you doing out here?” I asked shakily.

He took a step towards me, slowly bent down and took a long deep sniff of the top of my head. He exhaled and whispered, “I’m here for you.”

My heart leapt into my throat. I backed up, preferring to be closer to the precipice than this gigantic weirdo who had just taken a whiff of my hair. I didn’t know how to respond. “You… I…?”

Zeus-man gave a confused look, scrutinised himself, chuckled, then winked at me. “Oh, you must be concerned about being violated.”

The horrifying image hadn’t actually crossed my mind. It did now.

He pointed at his crotch. “I do admit, there is an exquisite penis under this robe, but do not make it your worry. I have no intention of using it on you.”

What the actual fuck?

“Okay…” I tremored. I would have run, had I not been pinned between the edge of a cliff and a deranged colossus.

The man peered up and whistled at the radiant sky. “Nothing quite like it, is there?”

I didn’t know how this stranger might react to me trying to bolt past him, so I decided to play it safe and indulge him for the moment. I glanced up at the blazing colours, not paying them any particular attention. “I… I guess not. I mean, yes – it’s quite beautiful.”

He sighed. “Upsetting though, that no one will be around to see how much more beautiful it becomes.”

His musing defused my fear, if only slightly. “What do you mean?”

He combed thick fingers through his long beard and smiled solemnly. “A fresh start is a glorious sight to behold.”

I supposed he had a point. “Who are you?” I asked, still dumbfounded at his sudden apparition. “And what do you mean you’re… here for me?” My curiosity got the better of me.

The giant introduced himself by offering a meaty hand. His left hand. “I like the name Helen.”

I didn’t take his hand. What game was this guy playing? “Helen is a woman’s name.”

He looked down at himself and grunted. “My second favourite name is Beauregard.”

The intimidatingly large man obviously didn’t intend to be truthful, but I maintained the nicety for his sake, and my safety. I reached out tentatively and did my best to accommodate his hand, which was more than twice the size of my own. “All right, Beau. I’m–”

“I will call you Horace. Yes, you look like a Horace,” Beau said, shaking my arm gently. He could rip it off if he wanted to.

“Sure. Okay.”

He let go of my hand and stared down at me. “It doesn’t matter what we call each other, though, does it? A name is not who we are.”

The way he said it triggered something in the back of my mind. But I paid it no attention. The man still hadn’t revealed anything about himself or his intentions.

I summoned a margin of courage. “L-Look, Beau,” I stammered. “I’m finding this kind of disturbing. What do you want with me?”

Beau continued to stare at me, unmoving. His features had turned hard and cold, calculating. Despite his previous goofy and disarming demeanour, his God-of-the-Old-Testament visage unnerved me.

“Disturbing…” he muttered under his breath. Then he rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Oh tolly-bosh!” He shook his giant head, swinging his wavy grey locks, his long silvery beard trailing behind. “Why is making friends such a trying affair?”

He exhaled wistfully. “On with the matter at hand then!” He strode out past me and came to a stop at the very lip of the cliff, fearless, half his robes billowing out over the edge. “I’m what you’d call an alien,” he declared, nonchalant. “Though not in the way you’ve come to imagine.” He gazed out at the magnificent vista marking the end of days. “I’m here because you’re one of thirty-one-thousand-four-hundred-fifteen human beings selected for brief interaction before your civilisation’s demise. The last one, in fact.”

I wasn’t expecting that. Although, I didn’t know what to expect. The poor man, calling himself an alien. He had obviously invented a fantasy to help him come to terms with his unsettling appearance. He’d insinuated himself that he had trouble making friends.

I caught my judgement. That was an unfair assumption. This was the end of the damn world. Who hadn’t gone mad or didn’t have reason to?

Still unsure of his intentions, I began backing away from him, a clear escape now open. And yet… something prevented me from racing off into the woods. This gentle giant seemed harmless enough. He probably just wanted some company during the apocalypse. I wanted the opposite. Nevertheless, I decided to play along, curious to see where this strange encounter would lead.

“I see. So basically you want an interview… with a human. And how was it that I came to make the cut?”

“Oh, the selection was randomised.”

I breathed a small laugh. “So what would you like to know, Beau the alien?”

Beau spun around, looking genuinely pleased that I was willing to entertain his fantasy. “Have you enjoyed your time on Earth?” he asked eagerly.

I figured I’d be honest. Why not? The end of the world seemed a senseless time to feign composure. “When I was a blissfully ignorant child, maybe.”

His bushy brow cinched together in a strained kind of sympathy. “What happened?”

I shrugged. “Nothing, I wised up. There was no devastating trauma in my life. Unless you consider mundanity traumatising, which I guess I do in a way. Everything was always so… ordinary, no matter how adventurous I tried to be. Travel, culture, lovers, art. And I never had any predilection for the spiritual or mystical. The world was just never enough for me. It all seemed pointless. That led me to realise early on that existence is meaningless. It troubled me.” My words flowed surprisingly freely. Geeze, was I that repressed?

I expected Beau to wax poetic about how we create our own meaning. He didn’t.

“Rippidy-dee, Horace, you’re right! You’d be gobsmacked to learn how few lifeforms in your universe have ever conceived of meaning as a concept. The ones that do, ha, they usually end up destroying themselves! Your species was almost there, too. It’s funny, really.”

My mind snagged on the phrasing he used. “My universe?”

“Oh yes, I’m just as much a visitor to your universe as I am to your planet.” He flicked a big hand in the air. “But that’s not important and I couldn’t explain it anyway. So tell me then, what stopped you from snuffing out your flame years ago?”

The candid question felt invasive, but I reasoned that it naturally followed given my previous nihilistic answer. “I don’t know. I always put it down to physiological repulsion. I mean, life is programmed to be disinclined to kill itself, right? If it weren’t, I think this would be a very empty planet.” I kicked a stone, and we both watched as it rolled off the cliff and was swallowed by blackness. “Suffering and desire are intertwined and ubiquitous for the living, but we’re hexed by instinct to do much about it.”

Beau peered down at the darkness below the cliff, then looked back at me. “But you’ve never shied away from the edge, have you, Horace?” The giant was revealing himself to be surprisingly perceptive.

“I’m not afraid to eat a bullet, no. Or in this case make the leap.”

“So what was really holding you back?”

I took a deep breath and looked down at my shoes. “A lack of certainty, maybe. The what-ifs. I just… don’t have the answers. I don’t even know if the questions I want to ask are worth asking, but I’m compelled to ask them. The temptation of temporary ignorance keeps me from making that ignorance permanent. It’s a curse.” I sighed then glanced up at the dazzling colours of the star-storm. Its allure was irritating, as if the universe was taunting me.

I’m beautiful but you’ll never know why!

“Actually, yeah,” I concluded in frustration. “I’m glad all this bullshit is coming to an end. I won’t ever get my answers, but at least I won’t be tormented by the questions anymore.”

“What are your questions?” Beau asked, seeming genuinely interested.

I was quick to recount them. They haunted me daily. They weren’t anything special – they’d been asked for eons – but their seductive mysteries, paradoxically, were all that kept me from killing myself. “Why is there something rather than nothing? What’s the fundamental nature of reality? What is consciousness?”

Beau looked lost in thought, then nodded dejectedly. He stepped to the side and swept out an arm, gesturing at the emptiness beyond the edge, at death in waiting. “What’s stopping you now?”

“Well it’s all going to burn whether I jump off that cliff or not,” I snapped.

“Wasn’t it always?”

Shit. This guy was actually pretty sharp. “You got me. Tomorrow or billions of years from now. Same difference. It’s all hopeless.” This was getting a little too therapeutic for my liking. “Where’s this conversation going, anyway?”

Beau bunched up the excess of his robes and sat down gracefully on the smooth stone surface of the bluff, his back to the abyss. “Nowhere, really, truth be told. That’s where all conversations eventually lead. It’s a wonderfully boundless place. You’ll know it when we get there.”

I’d had enough of this guy screwing with me. But I couldn’t leave. He was too… enigmatic. He was also infuriating. I pulled at my hair then cast my arms towards him. “Why the hell are you even dressed like that?”

He gawked up at me, agape. “You dressed me, Horace, you silly goose.”

Before I could demand that he explain what he meant, he shot me another of his questions. A question that burned right to the centre of my being. “If all the answers to the mystery of existence were suddenly made available to you, would you want to know them?”

“Yes. Unequivocally.” There was no hesitation. My life, had it any purpose at all, was to know those answers.

Beau reached into one of his wide dangling sleeves and retrieved an unremarkable white cube. He pinched it between a thumb and forefinger, held it up to his eyes, and then set it down carefully on the ground in front of him. “There you go.”

“What is it?” I asked suspiciously.

“Your solution. To everything.”

I raised an eyebrow. “It’s a cube.”

He shook his head, held a finger in the air, and grinned devilishly. “It’s a box.”

If this peculiar person didn’t already have my rapt attention, he had it now. “What’s in it?”

“I already told you. Why don’t you take a gander?”

I moved cautiously towards the sitting giant and crouched to pick up the object. I felt uneasy being this close to him. I rolled the little cube in my hands and inspected it. It was small enough to fit snugly in my palm. Heavier than I anticipated, it felt weighted like lead. It was warm and smooth like bone, its corners rounded like dice. There were no seams or hinges, no lid. I tugged and pressed at its sides to see if it had any hidden moving parts. It didn’t. It was wholly plain, its only curiosity being that someone had at all bothered to make a useless white cube.

I held it out to him. “It’s not a box,” I scoffed.

The giant lunged at me and seized my entire forearm in his fist. He yanked me close to his face and transfixed me with his bright otherworldly eyes. They reflected the roiling lights of encroaching doom. I wasn’t sure if I could move, but I dared not try. The edges of the cube bit into my trembling grip. I could feel his heavy breath on my skin. He restrained me there for a moment, silent and still…

Then he whispered something that melted my mind.

“You can’t open it from the inside.”

The world exploded into light.

***

Everything that ever was, is, or will be, all at once from every direction, from every distance, in every position, through all states, through all change, through all dimensions, from beginning to end, infinite and everlasting.

This was the appearance of reality were there no one for it to appear.

No eyes to paint the colours, no ears to play the tunes, no skin to sculpt the ridges… Yet all the seen, all the heard, all the felt – unfiltered, untainted, undefined – all-pervasive and ever-present. The un-see-able, un-hear-able, and un-touch-able, too. And the un-know-able.

It was as ubiquitous as it was vacuous. It was more than everything, everywhere and always… It was nothing, never and nowhere. The Un-Perceivable All.

And it was all a lie.

There was a sudden crack in the fabric of nothingness, bringing the stain of dimension into being. A horrifying light pierced and lanced with painful measure blinding holes through which gushed time and space. Dividing, separating… weaving threads of oblivion into distinct tangible somethings.

The world took a billion shapes, then a million, then a thousand, then only a few. Until finally, it took one shape around one tiny localised point, almost infinitesimal. Around me.

Me. I. Was there such a thing anymore?

The giant’s meaty fist dropped my forearm, the white cube tumbling from my grip. I scurried back and shot to my feet, grasping at my torso in a desperate need to feel solid, to feel boundaries to my being. My chest heaved in ragged breaths, as if I had just recovered from drowning. With every frantic inhale came innumerable thoughts that fizzled and popped like little automatons short-circuiting in my head. Thoughts that all seemed trivial, now.

The mountains, the trees, the stone beneath and radiance above… I absorbed the information like a man dying of thirst. My mind seemed to ache for the division of objects. Staggering realisation pulsed through me.

Beau picked up the little cube and returned it to its home in his cavernous sleeve. He then stood, his mighty stature towering over me once again. “I am sorry.”

Through my shaking and gasping I couldn’t help but smile at this enigmatic being, this alien. I felt faint with disbelief. I steadied my breathing and rubbed the shocking chill of nothingness from my arms. “Y-you’re for real,” I said through tears.

Beau held a finger in the air. “Well, that’s a matter of perspective.”

We both burst out laughing.

The sky shone with magnificent colours. I breathed them in on the currents of the cool night air. “I want to ask what just happened, but I fear the answer would only confuse me more.”

Beau stepped closer and stood by my side, looking up at the swirling spirits being exorcised from the atmosphere. “It was a trick, Horace. You must know that. It was a simulacrum of the ineffable to aid your understanding, that is all. Such a perspective is not truly possible.”

I felt a sort of detached disappointment, but I wasn’t bothered. Somehow, I already knew it. “It seemed so… real. More real than this, in a way. It was all an illusion?”

“Yes and no. But that’s not important. What’s significant is whether you understand the truth the experience was designed to impart. Have your burning questions been answered?”

I watched the stars, stationary behind the aurora’s billowing veil, and pondered for a time. The stars no longer seemed like distant objects forever out of reach. They were now like pinpricks in a sheet of emptiness, shining through with the light of awareness wherever my gaze came to rest.

Beau stood patiently. An hour must have passed. Maybe two. It didn’t really matter anymore. My sense of urgency had been sedated by the recent experience of timelessness.

Finally, I had something to say.

“Everything we think is out there, actually isn’t, is it? There is no out there. We’re tempted to think there might be, but there’s no real way of knowing. Not ever. We’re always limited by the constraints of our experience.”

Beau turned to me and nodded with an encouraging smile, urging me to continue.

I took a few strides and came to a stop at the edge of the cliff, gazing out at my favourite view, now awash with cosmic hues. “We assume that inside the universe there are minds, and inside minds there is consciousness. But really, it’s the other way around. Minds appear to consciousness just as the universe appears to minds. There is no fundamental reality outside of consciousness. There can’t be. This thing we call matter… it cannot exist independent of observation. There is no such thing as nothing, but there is no such thing as something, either. It’s the biggest myth of all!”

I laughed as a wave of comprehension hit me. I turned to the giant and circled my arms in the air. “There’s only the nature of experience. That’s all there ever is, however broad or detailed our vantage. Every discovery or examination we make about reality is really just a discovery or examination of our experience of what we believe is reality. It can’t ever not be.” I shook my head, astounded. “We’re not in the world, the world is in us!”

Beau’s eyes were wide. “Gosh. So what does that mean for those dire questions of yours, Horace?”

“It means they don’t make sense to me anymore. They’re irrelevant to my direct experience. I’m free of them. You’ve set me free, Beau.” I looked up at him, tears streaming down my face. “Right at the very end… you’ve set me free.”

He offered a simple knowing smile. “And your world’s imminent demise? How do you feel about that, now?”

“Sad. For all that might have been. For all the others. For all that will be lost. But selfishly, since it’s what brought you to me, it’s a price for peace I gladly pay.”

Beau nodded and stroked his long beard. “I’ve one last question for you, human being. Do you want to live?”

“Yes. I do.” I felt a spark of hope ignite inside me, something I hadn’t felt in years. “Can you save us?”

His brutal answer came like the cold of oblivion from which I was still reeling. “No.”

I didn’t ask why. I accepted that whatever the reason, it was beyond me, and undebatable anyway. “What will happen to you?” I asked instead. “Are you just going to blast off the moment before? Step through some portal back to wherever you came? Can’t you take me with you?” I held my breath.

Beau’s glare felt like he was appraising my soul. “Everything we ever need is right here, right now. There is no other time to be, no other place to go.”

I exhaled with a sigh. “But this can’t be it. I’ve only just found what I’ve been looking for. It can’t end now. I need to…”

“You need to what?” Beau interjected. “Do something with your realisation?” Beau’s bright eyes embraced mine with a solemnity that quieted the clamour of my internal narrative. He was serious now, and had something for himself to say.

“For most of your species’ recent history you haven’t been human beings, you’ve been human doings. Controlling, building, warring. Always searching for fulfilment out there. Searching, searching, searching. And if you happened to find what you were searching for, you were for a very short time content. Not because you finally had what eluded you, oh no, that would soon be replaced by more wanting. No, you became content because you temporarily ceased searching. For a very brief moment you weren’t looking out there, because attaining what you coveted gave you a fleeting glimpse of what it’s like to be at rest in here. You experienced completeness, if only transiently.

“Your personal realisation is important, Horace, but your mind is attached to an answer it thinks it’s been looking for. The answer was available all along, not to be discovered out there, but to be remembered in here.

“You have a final opportunity now, at the end of the world, not to do anything, but to be. Be what you are, right here, right now, without expectation, without judgement. Fall into the eternity of your own presence.”

His words nourished something innocent and pure deep inside me which hadn’t been tended since childhood. I nodded my understanding. The tiny flame of desperation flickering in the back of my mind had been snuffed. Salvation wasn’t in some kind of future, earthly or celestial. Salvation was now. It always had been.

I turned my attention to the absurd beauty all around me – no, within me. I reflected on this impossible encounter at the end of the world, on how it took a damn alien with magical powers to yank me out of the mental rut I had stagnated in for most of my life. Go figure. I caught myself laughing at the wonder of it all.

I closed my eyes and drew a long deep breath, feeling the cool air expand my lungs. I savoured the nutty scent of decomposing wood from the surrounding forest. I let go of the breath, and with it the levers that automated my thinking. I became witness for a time to the perceptions and sensations rising and falling in me without resistance, until finally I turned awareness on itself, and all time slipped away.

It wasn’t until what must have been hours later that I opened my eyes and a sense of duration returned, gently welcoming me back into the world of mind. “Thank you.”

Beau walked up beside me, gently squeezed my shoulder, then sat down on the cliff’s edge, his long robed legs dangling into the abyss. I joined him. Life and death, they weren’t opposites now.

“I have one final gift for you,” Beau said.

“I hope it’s not another one of your mysterious cubes,” I joked.

He held out a giant hand.

I took it.

He pulled me off the edge, and together we plummeted into darkness.

***

There was a deafening whoosh of air. A great lurch broke us from our earthly bonds and we were flung up and out of the gloom, clearing the treetops. Then with a thunderous clap we launched into the radiant night sky.

Flying… We were flying!

With extraordinary speed we zipped through the atmosphere until we were at the outer threshold of the planet, its horizon now a mighty curve. The sun was still eclipsed by the Earth, but dawn seemed everywhere at this height. The whole dark side of the world dominating my view was encased in swirling layers of frenzied purple-green light. Plasmatic ribbons leapt and arced like animated rainbows. The colours began to change, charging and pulsing orange and blue. The end was near.

We hovered there for a moment, inexplicably warm and full of breath. The weightlessness was intoxicating. And then we fell.

With equal speed as our ascent we hurtled back towards the planet. Our descent slowed as mountains and valleys came into view, and then we changed direction, zooming across the planet at an unfathomable velocity. Mountain ranges, vast lakes, and darkened cities whipped by in mere seconds. We gradually dropped altitude as we flew over the ocean, until we were almost skimming its surface. A coastline was fast approaching. Just when it felt like we would collide with its cliffs, we came to a sudden stop.

It was just before dawn here. A group of about a dozen naked people all stood at the waterfront, holding hands. They faced the east, awaiting their final sunrise. They were singing and laughing.

We were off again, lancing through thick cloud. Bright blinding light refracted through the water vapour, and I realised we had transitioned to day. We descended and came upon an elderly pair seated in folding chairs sipping wine in a woodland clearing. Two toddlers chased a dog in an out of a nearby tent.

Rocketing through the clouds again. A ravaged town this time, somewhere politically unstable. No sounds of gunfire, only prayer. Different kinds of prayer… simultaneously.

Sunset in cloud-scraping alpine peaks. Smiling monks at rest.

A city park at dusk wild with firelight. Hundreds of people dancing together, sweaty and ecstatic.

Twilight on a boat in a great lake. A father and son, each with guitar. Fish for dinner.

An orchard in the countryside bathed in sunlight. In the shade of a peach tree a couple making love.

Midnight atop a tall building. A stargazing poet thumbing through his notebook, mumbling revelations at world’s end.

Thousands of places, thousands of people, all over the globe. And none of them were fighting. Not one. Not with each other, nor with themselves. Those with the choice had chosen to live the last moments of their lives in a celebration of all they had left, the present moment itself.

Even those in pain seemed absent suffering – those with disease, in the throes of untimely death or childbirth, the lost, the starving, and the cold – even they were granted some vestige of peace by the signs in the sky. Somehow, the end was liberating even the misfortunate. They had no reason to desire a future without pain, for there was no future to be had. Suffering was a poison of a bygone era where its antidote hid in the promise of the forthcoming. Without past or future, there was no suffering. If only we knew this had always been so.

In our final hours, humanity had at last stopped searching. What we sought was never somewhere else, sometime in the future. It had always been within reach, here, now.

Racing back through the atmosphere, Big Bluff suddenly came into view, and we landed softly on its stony edge, high above the forested valley. As we touched down it felt as if my body was being compressed back into its corporeal form. I had not been aware of Beau holding my hand, but he let it go now.

I took back his hand. “Stay with me?”

Beau looked down with a smile and embraced me fully. “There’s nowhere else to be.”

We sat down on the cliff’s edge, shoulder to elbow, gazing out silently at the spectacle. The stars had faded now and the entire sky was being inundated with the soft yellow glow of dawn. The final dawn.

We sat, unmoving, as the fierce solar wind ravaged the painted sky.

I accepted fully what had arrived. There was no resistance, no desire. The inevitable had always been, and there was only ever suffering when there was a separate self to oppose it. That self had already leapt from the cliff.

There were no questions to be asked, no answers to be owned. When the mind became quiet, the body and the world became still. There was nothing to do but be. Nothing to be but present.

Nothing was relevant anymore but the light of consciousness. It illuminated all.

Even as our flesh was stripped from our bones, the light remained.

The oceans evaporated, the light remained.

The earth blackened, the light remained.

Life emerged anew, creatures walked and talked again, they searched and died, suns exploded and galaxies collided, the universe grew and grew…

And even as all the lights finally went out, still…

The light remained.

© 2016 by N.M.Watson