One

... and if I sat with one of them, I wonder what I would learn.

I drew this in a hospital waiting room to pass the time.

... because these things should be said.

Both religion and science have stated that space—the physical, so-called nothing—preceded us. Yet it is with the internal, innerspace termed consciousness, that we became aware of ourselves and reality and that vast non-thing we call space. It was the most adroit of innerspaces that offered a theory of bent space, gravity bending space, and at blackholes just ripping it.

Gravity also bends the innerspace, and the heavier the matter, the more warped the consciousness becomes: overly aware of that singularity and less so of the rest. It was in orbit of such a singularity that I awoke, with each passing hour tearing a larger hole within me.

"Is it not gravity," I had said to the sage, "is it not falling that makes flight possible?"

"Yes! Falling can impart quite the lesson. Perhaps it is the confine of gravity, by way of consciousness, which inspires flight."

Falling into my singularity, my thoughts accelerated, clocks faltered and I began to see traces of my past in millisecond instances and eventually in decades, and it became clear to me that the sage understood nothing.

Gravity holds the sky in place, and so tightly against the earth it becomes dense enough that a feather's push has force, and on a wing, many feathers can hold an eagle higher than a man's eye can see. The air's paths around a wing produces lift and so flight is possible. It's because of gravity: the air falls so the bird doesn't have to. I could not share this with the sage, he was not here, and I had not been with him for some time as I had taken my own path to understanding.

As time slowed further, and I stretched spatially and temporally, it also occurred to a skewed me that the greatest singularity—the one that this moment's sorrow orbited—is, in fact, the grave. Everything we do, everything we weigh pivots around mortality, the final fall.

The sage would have said to me, "Before you are claimed by that hole in the ground, in all your years, what will you do?"

It is said that there is a place between two celestial bodies where an orbiting object can be at rest between the gravitation of the two, the Lagrangian point. Somewhere between this moment's singularity and the eventuality of mortality is a place where the two are balanced in the innerspace to leave a moment of peace, perspective. When I turned away from the smaller singularity, towards the larger, I saw that the gap between the two could not be clearly measured, the space was too skewed, but it seemed to me that I was still light years from the final singularity.

It was by way of this understanding that I found a point of rest.