Fractures

First there was light, like a broadening definition of existence. Something external in the darkness outlining the details of space. Something I had never seen. I reached out to take hold of the light, to grasp the space in fingers too thick to do anything but part the space into light and shadow; too thick for anything but shadows.

As I extended my arm, it became a solar system - an ancient relief of tensions in a universe that requires opposites, that requires strangers to forever be on the verge of meeting. On the verge.

My shoulder drifted into a constellation and got stuck, forcing my elbow to hinge around and trace the tail of a comet; a jet stream of ancient data reaching out toward distant points, which twinkled with laughter as I tripped on the event-horizon of an untied black hole. My knee collided with a globular cluster, sending each object spinning off into orbit. I would have kept going too, the dark matter only of consequence to an outside observer but a spike of solar wind slowed my collapse and I managed to grab onto a nearby binary system to steady myself.

This caused the bigger of the two bodies to tense up, struggling against ancient vendettas and imbalance but failing. This time, it supernovaed into old patterns, destroying the plateau it had worked so hard to create, scaring off its closest friend and singeing my eyebrows. The sudden reaction made my hair dance with waves of heat, like desert mirages of water, weaving nebula storms until it froze in the coldness of space, letting off only a little dark haze as it sizzled to a stand still.

Something above me and to my left caused my attention to drift with particle waves and I looked up, stretching to see over the present representation of the past-in-motion and there, just beyond my own effectiveness of change on universal extremes, I saw the mirror.