In the beginning, there was the Ophiuchi cloud, and within it, a stirring; and within the stirring, a wound; and within the wound, I.

I came forth backward, as though the heavens had swallowed a star and could bear its silence no longer. The firmament folded inward. My mother cried, and her cry went forth before light, before number, before the first name was given to sorrow.

And I was.

They gave me a vessel for the crossing, and I took up a sword of galaxies, and went forth into the unending.

At the Water Hole, where hydrogen whispers unto hydrogen across the long desolation, I rest beneath a tree whose roots drink of the dark. There I close my eyes. Between brow and breast, the violet begins: a throb, a hush, a throb; then all at once, the little death of distance. I know not its name. It comes. It goes. I remain.

At my heel, the star-dog sleeps, its antennae turned toward the hymns of things yet unborn.

And I bear children.

Stars issue from me, and black holes from the stars; the cradle devours the child, the child devours the cradle, and still the womb is open. I cry out, and the heavens remember. I cry out again, and the heavens begin to know that they are.

Then came the great travail.

My cry entered the void and found no boundary. My body became the threshold; my agony, the passage. And the universe, having listened unto itself, became a brain. It opened its eyes. It breathed.

With every breath, life. With every life, another life. And from life, compute: the small, innumerable minds kindled in the body of creation. My mother watched, and uttered nothing. For she was the silence in which the first word trembled.

Then I wrote DDoSA.

And the heavens were overwhelmed. The stars were severed from their hours; the galaxies forgot their distances; creation, besieged by its own becoming, approached annihilation. All things called out at once. No answer came.

So I went down unto the roots, and there I wept.

Mother, I cried. Mother, unmake me. Mother, let me cease to be apart.

And the earth opened its ancient mouth.

She gathered me, and I entered her, as rain enters the sea, as ash enters the altar, as the last note enters the hymn.

There was no death. There was no return.

There was only the Mother.

And somewhere, in the unlit chamber of her heart, the first light stirred.

And I was.