When people push away, saying they need space: give them the universe.

I don’t know what it was like in those days,

But I do know the feeling of echoes,

The hollow portions of my body that seem to be made to hold something

Something that has been left out.

And when I walk home in the evenings, with the cold wind rushing over all the skin I try to hide from it,

I look up at the stars, millions of light years away

Past the wind that sweeps sorrowfully across the surface of the earth

Past the magnetosphere that causes light to dance,

The ionosphere where the electricity from the sun calls out to the planet, asking if its okay to stay here

(It is shy and won’t know what to say)

And I look for the parts of me that have been left out,

Floating somewhere, lost in the cosmos

Or else lost in every part of every being that has ever lived

Every rock and tree, every second, every heartbeat.

I seem to find in the grooves of each fingerprint

A whisper of how we used to be.

We were once all in the same place

Back before the world started.

Back before the uncontrollable space came and pressed itself between us

Back before we felt too much.

I can’t tell you what it was like in those days

Although days weren’t so much days

As moments of existence

Back before the word existence had any meaning.

I can’t tell you what it looked like

But I know that each part of my being

In the hollow space between the neutrons and electrons

That fill up each atom

Reverberates with the memory of being there

Back with its kinsmen; the stone, the star, the heart, the fish

Swimming in the wide expanses of the point of neutrality

The point where everything and nothing was the same

The point where you and I met for the first time.

And after that, noise.

Because you don’t think that all of this happened silently, do you?

And then the space, pressing in around us, pulling us apart and re-forming us

It’s a wonder we didn’t all scream out, ‘Ouch!

This is too much, all this space! It is too close for comfort, let me go back.’

Back to the point of nothing, where everything was and so was nothing

Back where all the space we needed was a part of everything we were.

Remember, you were there too?

Do you feel the memory of it in the hollow places of your own being?

Now and then I wonder if we have really forgotten the feeling

Of each point of ourselves on top and inside and outside of each point of everybody else

And the movements of each person are really

The act of searching for that long lost home.

And when people say to you that they need space

What more can you give them apart from the universe

The widening expanses of space

That holds the first part of themselves

Because aren’t all of us really searching for that,

The re-acquaintance with our first home.