Organic Orrery

“Allow me to elucidate.”

I heard him begin to explain. I heard him begin, but that is all I heard. Everything else was drowned out as the sun rose, the whirring of the cogs and gears that lift it daily to the sky muting all else, the movement of that great living machine of the Universe was all that could be heard. It was all that could ever be heard.

I could not hear him speak, but I could read his lips. His enunciation was clear, didactic. It was obvious when he spoke that there was gravity in his words, the kind that shifted planets and formed constellations. Every pause and breath a comet, caught in the sweeping ellipses of its orbitals; every word a star, hung like lanterns, bright points in the darkness of silence.

It was easy to omit words in the reading of his lips. The pulsing glow under the skin of his chest was a clear diversion, the cluster of stars which had amalgamated there through centuries of greedy aberration constantly drew my eyes downwards, imperceptibly lower with each passing instant. It was all I could do to resist glancing into his celestial core, but I knew a moment of contact would be all it would take for my vision to fail me, or worse, for me to be drawn into the irradiate heat of his being and deliquesce into nothing.

Even though I knew this, the organic orrery within him still called to my eyes, the hum of fission and fusion within him was a gentle, omnipresent siren song, constantly begging to be acknowledged. It seemed to call not from him, but from inside my mind. My thoughts were drowned out by the low thrum of the stars, and for a long while, it encompassed all that I thought. I wondered what it must be like, housing something so immense as a solar system just beneath one’s skin, a sun burning in the absence of a heart, planets as vestigial organs left over from whatever God it was who brought us into existence. It was a rare gift, to be born with the propensity to house such a thing within the confines of human flesh. What a great numen it must be, but what a great burden. I could but imagine the grand responsibility such a faculty would impose; an entire cosmic ecosystem subservient to the health and whims of one man, no greater than those who make a home of the terrestrial bodies within his hollowed frame.

He did not feel this burden, though. This sense of duty towards that which he had acted incubator to, from it’s earliest days as a primordial soup of dormant energy and silent matter, brought to life only by the firing of his heart, the ignition of a sun whose light had provided life, and whose gravity had provided form. He was a nihilistic God. He granted no value to the cosmos within him other than that it’s sun provided him with life, the rotation of the planets around it propelling the dark matter that enveloped them through his veins like blood. When his heart beat it shone with light as pure as any, and when he bled he bled a night sky alive with black void and distant stars. These were the most prevalent signs of what existed within him, and to him, the most prevalent reasons for it’s existence. The macrocosm within his form owed him the life it provided. In turn, he thought, he owed it nothing.

In my youth I spent long hours pondering how someone could be so calloused; how he could grant such little significance to something so miraculous. Now, though, looking back on my life and into his eyes, his view seemed to me as inevitable. Necessary, even. I had only ever been responsible for one life — my own. I had only ever needed to assure my own well being; I had no universe within me, no divine role to play. Even then, it had proved to be a nearly Sisyphean task at times. That same demand, that responsibility for life scaled exponentially, infinitely, would be enough to callus anyone, enough to leave any God silent.

Finally, I broke my meditation, returning my gaze to his face, his lips, and their words.

“So you understand? You’re sure?”

I nodded silently. Dumbly. I didn’t, of course. I think he knew, but he did not care. I may not have discerned the words he had said, but his message I still understood. I felt embarrassed, voyeuristic, even, for the brief glimpse I had been given into his psyche. Regardless of the words I had not heard, I had learned more than I could have ever hoped. I knew the truth, and I accepted it with ease. I was as inconsequential to him as whatever life existed on the celestial orbs between his ribs, and he to whatever body housed ours.

After he left me, I felt odd. Strangely at peace, but also hollow, empty. I sat and beamed out at the sky, listening to the whirring of the Universe, watching the sun set and the moon take its place, tracing their clockwork orbitals through the cosmos. I sat and I wondered. I wondered what our place was, where we existed, and who we existed within. I wondered if whoever it was ever felt guilt, pride, or anything at all about us. I wondered at what point they had stopped caring, and whether they ever had at all.