I.
In the beginning, there was darkness. Smeared ink stretching like an inexorable lullaby infinitely. And in the beginning there was chaos, destruction on a level beyond human comprehension. A never-ending cascade of heat and light blazed where before there had only been blackness. Clouds, floating folds of color and light, delicately shivered. And in between this dust and gas, stars were born. Swirling masses of heat and light curving cherry-red, dwarfing this tiny thing we called the Sun. Dive deep, past layers upon layers of stifling heat. A tiny core, so dense that helium becomes hydrogen, carbon melts into nitrogen. Too, dense, in fact; this core buckles in on itself, exploding in a blaze of white-hot heat, pressing against the well-worn sides of infinity. And beneath this destruction lies something dark and incorporeal, virtually undetectable, a vacuum so powerful it warps gravity, and time itself. Even light cannot escape from its frothing, amorphous depths; it leaves nothing behind, this puncture in space, this tattered rip in time, this gaping hole in the fabric of the universe.

II.
Everything is eternal, a flickering candle in the murmuring darkness. And we are but stars. Swirling clouds of dust and nothing and universe-soul and light and gas. We too spin in the everlasting darkness, stretching nebulous light across the dark-eyed recesses of the universe.

III.
I heard once that the lowest note ever to exist is the sound a black hole makes. Perhaps you can hear it, in the crushed velvet crevices and silk ribbon creases of your mind. Perhaps it’s a low, silken rumbling crash, like that of a hollow, thunderous drum? Something, perhaps, to rival the gauzy brilliance of the surrounding stars, pulsing like beating hearts in the darkness. An infinite sky of twinkling eyes, blinking slowly and serenely, as if to a silent metronome. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…Or maybe it’s a lost echo of the incandescent supernova that created it, its blinding light shaking the very soul of the universe; the creased, nameless corners, where time crumples like construction paper. Perhaps it’s the compilation of the tinny screams of the flakes of stars, the indefinite light, the streaking comets, the blush of a dying star, the universe-dust, all sucked and forever trapped inside its twilit, cavernous black maw.

Perhaps, most unlikely of all, it’s merely the music of the universe itself, the fiery shadows that make up the space between stars.