She crosses in front of him, some part of him compelled to follow. After several steps she stops, crouching down like an inquisitive child. She picks something up from the ground. She examines it, the flower blossoming in her hand as she does so. It blossoms at her touch, steam to flower blooming in an uneven, almost electric, fervor until it’s finished, pale white transformed to an red that seems to ringing against the pale earth that bore it.

The color stays only for a moment, the mass quickly beginning to wane and wither, it’s corpse shriveling into an ash grey cast. She closes her fist around the shrived remainder. The flower surrenders to her grasp without a sound.

Tilting her head up she casts the remains into the air above her. They fly for a moment, hundreds of thousands of specks soaring until—as if coming in contact with some extra-dimensional canvas—stick to the air and begin to hum. The air seems to shiver, drawing light from the world until it’s as if night has fallen and only the hanging glow of the ash remains.

“Look at it. You see them? These dots. Each one is a galaxy, within each of these billions lies trillion other dots, each of which carries its own billion planets riddled with the potential that will lead to some version of you. A new world, another filament strong across the universe. A another pouring of cells, so cowardly, so sweetly self-obsessed. It’s all there, written in the stars, billions of trillions of billions of times over.

She waits a moment before continuing, but only just.

“You can’t grasp it. It is beyond you. Beyond what you are. You can look at the numbers, see the beauty of it’s being, but that is all. To understand, to truly grasp the power those numbers, let alone what they represent, would destroy you. Every dream, every heartache you’ve ever endured would flounder into obscurity. The most you can do, the most you can offer the world, the simplest part of what allowed you to congeal for the heartbeat you allowed here, is diffidence.  It begins and so it ends, but—my god— what it must be to be given the chance at all.”