The Stars in Our Eyes
WD February Flash Fiction Challenge — Day 29
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This is my Day Eighteen entry to the Writer’s Digest February Flash Fiction Challenge. The prompt is to write a story about the stars. I admit, up front, that this is not technically fiction. But I put in the prompt, and this is what came out. There’s nothing I can do.
In the beginning of all things, whether you call it the Big Bang, or hold with “God said, ‘Let their be light,’” the universe we know and experience, came into existence with a mighty, cosmic explosion. This has been described well by others who are much better with words than I.
What we know, or what we postulate is that everything that we can see, here on our rock of a planet, and also out in the huge expanse of the heavens, all of it is hurtling unbelievably fast, outward from that ancient explosion. All the while, stars are being born and worlds created as the stuff from this massive explosion moves away from the point of origin.
Everything that is, had its origin in that one event. Everything that is consist of the same bits of matter that were thrown so forcefully outward. The planets, the Earth, the moon, the Sun and all the stars in the universe — they are all of the same original substances.
What was it that exploded? We don’t know, but something did, something that pre-existed everything that we know. What was it like? We really don’t know. But all the matter in the universe is the debris from that explosion It is all that remains of what was before.
The universe that is, came into being at the point of another’s death. Whatever, whoever it was that exploded so violently, we can be sure it was the end of that, at least, that as it was. Perhaps it exists now, and it is us — everyone and everything.
That is an interesting point, that life comes from death, that the end of one thing can bring the birth of another. It is like a universal principle, sown into the universe at the point of our creation.
So here we are, made from the stuff of stars. When they say we are stardust, they speak the truth. Stars are part of us, they exist in us, in every heartbeat, and every breath.
In one tradition, these words are spoken over our dead — from dust we came and to dust we will return. It can also be said, from the stars we came, and to the stars we will return. We are destined for the stars!
It is our fate, our destiny, to rise above the shackles of gravity, and the limitations of our tiny planet, and stretch ourselves across universe with stars in our eyes.
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