Of Entropy and Existence

The Untold Tale

My Dearest Sara,

There’s a quiet tale told by fires everywhere. It passes from lip to ear and never stops. Like a virus, It consumes its listeners, burning them hot with the fever of knowledge until they cannot take it any more. Until they cannot bear it anymore. The virus must be spread. And they are the vector. They open their lips, they write their words and the tale goes on.

It starts in a silent meadow. Or was it a meadow? Nobody really knows. All that they know is that she was there. She had to be. Where else could she be? She needed a place to be and that was it. Nobody knows this ‘where’ and what it looked like. But we all know it was calm, It was beautiful, It was magnificent. Like a glorious green meadow.

And there she sat, lost in thought. Carried away by her musings. Slowly watching the grass dance to a wind that didn’t exist and staring at the infinite distance. I cannot tell you what she was thinking about, I did not know her then, nobody did. Perhaps nobody still does. And yet we tell her tale all the same. But wait, this tale is not about her. No. It is about the box. Ah, the box.

The box appeared. Where from, why, when, are all questions that enjoy the darkness offered by the shroud of mystery that they inhabit. All we know was that it wasn’t there, And then it was. Right in front of her. A curiosity presented to a curious one. A tasty morsel presented to the hungry. Some say it looked like a treasure box, promising riches and wealth within. Others swear it looked plain, like a traveller’s satchel, old and nondescript. Some swear it was an egg, I’m more interested in what they were drinking when they recorded their version of the story.

Anyway, the curious one, She-whose-name-has-been-lost-to-time could not resist. She stood and walked around the mysterious object. Her mind, so vast and so deep pondered on what was within. What could it be? Treasures? Wonders? And who brought it here? To her grass-filled meadow? Questions filled her mind, and those questions met, went for dinner, asked questions, got married, and bore even more questions. Her curiosity ran deep and she was not about to go unsatisfied. Slowly, she reached out. And opened it. (or cracked the egg, or so they say — Pretty sure it was a box)

What happened next defies explanation. Light. Sound. Music. The light shone so bright that she had to shield her eyes. The sound that followed shook the earth beneath her feet, making her very bones vibrate. And the harmony that played as these two forces of nature ripped out into existence could only be described as music. A song she had never heard. The box was gone. And the meadow was slowly swallowed by this new light and the music filled her ears. The music of Existence.

She stood and stared in awe at the beauty around her. It was all-consuming. Light gathered itself into tiny speckles and shone brighter. The music hummed across the distance as far as her ears could hear. And she could not contain herself. She ran between them. The tiny floating specks, now slowly separating. Hot blue ones, large red ones, brown ones slowly coalescing. She couldn’t take her eyes off it all. But she felt it in her bones. There was something else. Something dark. Something Primal. Something that lurked in the dark shadows that now started filling the space where light had been before.

She could see it, a slow-moving monster. Silent and stalking. Slowly chewing through the beauty and warmth. It consumed everything in its path, taking it’s sweet time to savour the taste of Existence before snuffing it out. She reached out to stop it and was hit by the strength of realization.

The two could not exist without each other. Balance. On one hand Existence. And on the other, something else. She named that monster Entropy.

Yours, Always,

Lawrence

#Entropy #Existence #ShortStory