I can almost touch the past — it is not so very far. Not even what is the most ancient in this world. It is merely a few degrees of separation away; you may have even touched stone that had its form forged from fires of a billion years ago. We all had our beginning from the primordial singularity, as the story goes; the elements were just shuffled around, compacted, and formed to make us, us. We are all of us not very far from the origin of all things. There is, too, the chain of life that must have existed from the first single-celled organisms to the complex beasts that we are now: if the chain did not stretch all the way back, if it had been broken, we would never have been. The warmth of bodies now cold — they were real, this world was theirs, and it takes only the smallest of dreamings to conceive how time stretches back, back, and unfurls their stories. The experience of it all known, the wonder of everything.
