~A Time Between Place~

~A Place Between Time~

And in the inconceivable expanse of space, at a time between place and through a place between time, travels a mote of dust.

Its journey is measureless. Its memories are innumerable. The multitudes of life it touched and changed are undefinable. And though not all memories have a name, it remembers them all, and would relive them from time to time. A shift in gravity. A ray of starlight. It doesn’t take much to jostle this mote of dust into one of its innumerable recollections.

It remembers the weight of a crown. It remembers the death of a firstborn. It remembers the spray of ocean against sheer white cliffs. It remembers the wind beneath its wings.

And it floats on. In the inconceivable expanse of space, and through the immateriality of time, the mote of dust floats on.

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Minutes turn to hours. Hours into years. Years into aeons. Aeons into eternity—ephemera writ large. And still, it floats on. It floats until it brushes against another mote of dust, and in the fraction of a moment where this improbable meeting takes place, shared memories pass between them.

The glare of blue flames amidst the planet’s haze. The smear of rusted metal on delicate hands. The breezy summer shade beneath a crabapple tree. Idle words shared across the boundaries between dreams. The lingering heat of a lover’s kiss.

The moment is impossibly brief. They’re together, then they’re not. Just two motes of dust in the inconceivable expanse of space. They may never meet again, until the end of time that stretches to immateriality.

And yet, they don’t grasp. They don’t linger. They part, with each taking memories they share and memories they don’t. And they continue their journeys—measureless, separate, one and the same.

For it’s enough that, here in the endless fabric of the universe, for one brief yet infinite moment, they belonged to one another.

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THE END AND THE BEGINNING