Chapter Text
This story begins as many stories do, with the phrase ‘once upon a time’. That phrase, when you think about it, adds a certain magic to a story. It allows the reader to choose when the story happened. Was it last month? A year ago? A decade ago? Five hundred decades ago? Maybe even five thousand? And, in the end, does it matter? ‘Once upon a time’ kicks off a timeless story, and allows the reader to write in a tiny part of it.
Once upon a time, there was a star. Now, there was nothing unique about this star. It was a superheated ball of fiery gases just like all the other stars. The atoms that would eventually (or maybe they already did) make up the entire universe forming inside that little (or not, it depends on what scale you use) star. Remember these atoms, they’ll be important later.
Once upon a time, there was a girl. This girl, much like the star, was just like other girls. She was nothing but a chunk of matter that, through some strange turn of fate, had found itself in the right conditions to form a sentient being. She hated the beach, and loved thunderstorms. She had all of the things that are prerequisites of being sentient. She had likes and dislikes, phobias and hobbies, dreams and worries. At the risk of sounding cliched, she was a unique snowflake in a field of snow. Remember that I started this story with ‘once upon a time’. At this moment all you know about the girl is that she’s sentient, and what her opinions on the beach and the weather are. As the reader, you can imagine her as anybody you like. Perhaps she’s modern-day royalty from Nigeria, maybe she’s a farmer in Scotland from the 1500s, she might live in a beach house in Italy in the far future, or she could have lived in Mongolia seven thousand years ago and be hating the concept of a beach that she’s never seen. She can be American, South African, Australian, Indonesian, Russian, or Argentinian. Whatever image you have of who she is, hold on to that, it’s correct.
Once upon a time, there was a natural disaster. It wiped out an entire community. Does the size of the community matter? History remembers the devastating ones, they look at the eruption of Vesuvius and say, “look at how many people died, isn’t it such a tragedy?”. History remembers the well-documented ones, they will look at Covid-19 and say, “look, this is what happened, look these were the consequences, isn’t it such a tragedy?”. History forgets the small disasters, a flood that wiped out an entire village hundreds of years ago. History forgets the disasters that weren’t documented, the plague that devastated a region thousands of years before writing was invented. That is natural, and it makes sense. It means you can choose what kind of disaster this one was (or maybe will be). What matters is that it happened (or will happen) and the girl from earlier was part of that community. She died. Did she die alone, or with friends? Did she die quietly or screaming? Was she in pain or was it sudden? Does it matter? Did you remember the atoms in that star? Those were the atoms that formed the girl, and they were the atoms that caused the disaster. As the girl’s body began to rot, those atoms continued to change, taking new forms, as they had done countless times before (that part’s true no matter when you think this story happened). Atoms, unlike the girl, are not sentient; they will not remember the girl nor will they mourn, and eventually when planet Earth has long since become dust and the universe ends, they will not notice when they cease to exist.
Once upon a time, a story ended, and an infinite number of new ones began.