I’ve fallen off the edge of the earth.

Well, fallen is a misstatement. I probably jumped. In any event, my feet did the work, not me. I simply lifted off and peeled back into the atmosphere like the torn skin of an orange. There was a thumbing of the earth against my temple when I broke the seal of gravity. Pressure beat and wrestled through my body in ripples, pulling me from green to blue to murky gray. And then I was alone.

The air here is not air. It is something I can neither plumb nor fathom, and I hang in it like a snared creature, spasming against the dark alms that cradle me. Dying stars taunt and sear at my skin from some far corner of the galaxy, watching knowingly as I thrash and thrash and, succumbing to exhaustion, eventually still.

I cannot feel it, but I know the ice is beginning to creep between my squirming, viscous cells, greedily blooming through veins and capillaries, a symphony of whistles and pops as I take in the universe. I make no sudden move, but strip myself of shoes and shirt and eyelashes and nails. Dimensions fold and accordion before me, infinite pathways converging and returning, then fragmenting again into scapes of gravity and pits of mercury, in the reflection of which I see myself reach out to touch. I toddle and blubber before creation, a quivering worm clung to the balcony seats of the highest angel.

I watch a cosmic symphony.

It’s a long while before I notice my body below, puffed and evaporating into the sea of air I hang in. It reassures me; the fact that there is nothing I can do. An ancestral mother cups her fingers around my being; spindles of ice, some fate or other force, coming to creep at the edges of my corneas.

I freeze for more time than you or I can ever know, my mind unspooling further with each tide of light and time that comes to climax and disperse at the edge of my vision. When the cold begins to seep into my irises, I finally see it. The gravity of everything, come to envelop me. My skinned knees, college report cards, laughing Father, yapping puppies. My bullies, my best friends, my first love. My life, in an infinite continuum of sharded moments, running smooth like rain into a hole. I watch my hands, skin, legs, breasts, eyes dissolve and fly to new worlds, new galaxies, maybe even new universes. I am a great, bodily diaspora.

These days, I watch space crawl into new corners of itself, proliferation and collapse dancing across an infinite sky. I run alongside the young; becoming grown, becoming dead, becoming new. Below, the earth dawns green scruff then blackens again and again, growing cratered and leeched, filled and populated.

Tears run within me as the sun reaches to envelop its cored and hollowed child, then rebirths it anew in a splash of blaze and light. From time to time, I see myself, a blip of evanescence, blooming over and over into everything. I feel the humans, somewhere in the midst of the unending cacophony, busy scalding and licking each other anew. If only they knew the dying of the light was but the beginning of day. How I wish they could see.

How I wish they could jump.