The Weight of witness

As your God I humbly repent, my spiritual being born to the cosmic blasting and the emptiness that drove me mad long before your creation. Your psychologists might call it a cycle of abuse, bound by laws outside of me—all things must come in cycles. Matter cannot be created from nothingness. And I must affirm, I am not all-powerful. From the moment I was born, all I could first do was watch the pressure build. Thy name is gravity. Slowly, I exacted it. The first elements brought me such joy. Then came the collisions. They filled space with something tangibly, more than mere particles. I hungered for more, without a belly to fill it was my mind that longed for—new. For experiences outside my immediate control. Not that I can control my nature, by my presence there is weight, density, the laws of matter. Though I know not who gave me this role, or who saw fit to make the noble gasses I then drew together. Maybe I am not a God, but I do see—eyes everywhere, or more akin to a spider web feeling the slightest pressure. Able to feel the smallest shift in the multitude of universes that make up my flesh.  

Ten aeons passed, and my only sensations were that of compressing elements and explosions. I was fascinated by the new compounds blown into existence, heavy metals. The first planets were like grandmother's blanket, warm and heavy, they coddled me through the next millions of years. Simple exactness is the only way I can explain this span of time, every element did as it should—combine, expel, forge into something new only to combine again. The science of chemical reactions, the laws of space and time. Nothing in my web had any autonomy, any ability to act outside of the gravity tethered to its existence. Nothing could disobey or surprise me. It is funny, always being right can be exhausting. One of your philosophers got it right, that as a Divinity I might choose to dream. Countless dreams of all the best things, all the best experiences, but then even that might grow boring. So what next? A dream where I might forget I’m God, might experience a short life of battles, betrayal, confusion—to then wake up and realize that all the power I longed for as a mortal IS in fact in my power. That was my hope when I created you.  

Before my madness, from the split nuclear instant I became aware, I knew what I would one day long for. So through desire, or will, or prayer, I ensured that someday a sun might appear in just the right spot of the Milky Way. And that an orbiting planet would be taken into its gravity. From there I had to wait, to witness multitudes of failure as life, the silly little molecules of your ancestors struggled to exist.  Imagine will you, your lifespan so far without music, art, books, plays, or television, while you might have science this would be an existence devoid of—empathy. Flavor. Through your eventual creation, I sought amusement. While your kind cried up at the sky and made sacrifices for good favor, I watched—powerless. Eager to see what failure would mean for fleshy creatures who walk upon cooled molten ground and who drink up water. It is mankind that possesses the closest thing to free will. Even if only for a moment, these decisions fight the natural order resulting in such incredible diversions.  

While I have never answered a single prayer, you have answered mine. Now there exists within my web so many stories that pull on me, and from their pages a billion worlds for me to step into and dream anew. Pretending to be a character is the closest I’ve come to walking among you. I never sent a son. Maybe the apple falling on Newton's head was my nearest prophet. The swaying trees, the bruised knees of first standing babes my gospel.

  There need not be ten commandments. 

Only the simple law…. 

Need of mine—disobey. 

Do what I cannot, love, scandalize, create a mess. Through all your texts, prayers, and screams, I do now have empathy for the destruction your creation has meant. Your murders are far more shattering than the chemical bonds I break. I needed you… and you deserved a God that could end your suffering. I don’t delight in maiming though it is a creative way to make pain and flesh one tapestry. While a treaty makes for an inspiring glance, it is war that fills my belly with stories of loss and new paths sought by widows and aggrieved children. Alas, the weight of a lifted pen for peace is not mightier than the forging, striking, and breaking of swords. It is a similar burden that the artists feel, a connection to pain, the blissful and destructive space of sorrow. Watching your history is akin to exploring a wound, exploiting it for new and spine-tingling sensations.  

By your poets I know the warmth of a first kiss, the joys of birth, a life fulfilled—and yet my favorites are the tombs of heartbreak, longing, betrayal, and bloodlust. Crimes that are incapable of being committed against me. While I have no sexual urges you might call me a sadist. I take glee in anything that moves beyond the patterns of my influence. You humans are hard to weigh the emotions of. Your flesh is weak, you give in to temptation even when you know deep in your soul that it is wrong. And yet a mother can lift a car when her child is trapped beneath it. While some other parents easily abandon or murder their young, casting it out of the nest for simple traits like being gay. So many life-changing forks in the road that will take me a millennia more to explore. You amaze and disgust me, and I love you all the more for it. There is no pride in me when you plant a field of flowers nor when your enemies blood soaks into mud—I do not care if you win or lose—simply that you continue on.  

Through all your religions there is this idea of confessing sin, the above is me purging out the truth of my crimes. Perhaps I should have been content to live alone in boredom, sparing you the pains of existence. There is no single life or moment I can point to in your history that validates the grand sum of loss your species has suffered. Many of you decree that life is worth it but let me say that if you saw the stories I have—the dry suckling mouths of despair that are the backbone of the four horsemen—then you too might struggle to say the juice was worth the squeeze. Someday, whether your planet dries up under your own cause or the many seeds of generations not yet had explore and take root in space—there will still be a trillion years of silence to follow when the last you dies to the time the universe entropies. How insane will I be when I’ve read the final story, recalled the last of experience…. Maybe that is why the universe will end—I will have lost all conviction to hold the cosmos together when there is no more hope for distraction.