I am falling through time-space. I have been falling for a very, very long time—the falling feels eternal, as though it originated before and outside of time-space proper as we know it. I pass through a long series of lives like a cannonball falling through tautly-held sheets of tissue paper (with each sheet representing the span of a single life). But always, outside of all these lives, I am in space and I am falling. And I am alone and I am suffering. Ever since the beginning, a very, very long time ago, I have been falling and I have been alone and this falling-loneliness, this lonely-fallenness, has caused me to feel a seemingly endless amount of pain and suffering. I pass through another long series of lives. Many of these lives take non-human forms and exist prior to the formation of the earth. I am a star, a rock, a plant, something non-material. But in the span of time-space that I have fallen, none of these is longer or thicker than a single sheet of tissue paper. Before all of these lives, I was and am.
Because of my loneliness and suffering, I am grieving. Constantly grieving. I am weeping as I fall. My heart feels broken—the way our hearts feel at the moment when the break occurs. This grief will not heal over. This wound will not close. I am so sad, and sore, and alone, that it makes me physically ill. I vomit violently as I fall.
As I said, this goes on for a very long time.
And then I begin to hear a voice. It is a very large voice—bigger than the galaxies by which I am passing, much, much bigger—and it is a very old voice. Much older than me, although I feel older than time-space itself. I feel small and new in comparison to this voice. And this is what the voice says:
“You’re okay. Everything is going to be okay. We’re going to get through this together. You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re okay.”
And as this voice speaks to me it soothes my pain, it removes my loneliness, it comforts my grief, and it makes me feel well. I stop falling. I no longer feel sick. I begin to feel waves of love and peace passing over me and through me. I begin to feel euphoric.
But then the voices says: “If you have more you need to get out, you can get it out. It’s okay to let it all out. You’re safe. Just get it out.”
And, instantly, I am falling again. And I am suffering, and I am alone, and I am heartbroken, and I am sick. This occurs, just like before, until the voice breaks into my existence. “You’re okay. Everything is going to be okay. We’ll get through this together. You’re okay.” And I am calmed again, and again I feel the euphoric waves of love and peace that heal me and overwhelm everything else—but again the voice says, “you have more you need to get out,” and again I fall, and this cycle repeats itself many times.
Eventually I realize that I am trying to run from my loneliness, pain, grief, and sickness, I am trying to rush the experience of being loved and feeling at peace, and that I will not be able to truly experience those things until I let all my pain, and loneliness, and grief, and sickness out. And the voice knows this and will not let me back to the life I am living now, or the fullness of those feelings of love and peace, until I do this.
And I also realize this: the purpose for me in this life is to realize these things: That I am okay. That everything is going to be okay. That we’ll get through this together. And, again and most especially, that I am okay. That is why, as I fall through and outside of time-space, this is the life I keep coming back to and know that I will “wake up” within again. This, I come to understand, is the life where I realize that I’m okay. It’s a turning point in the eternity of “before” and “after” in which I was and am.
So, I alternate between falling and resting in the voice until my pain, my loneliness, my grief, and my sickness are truly purged from me. And the waves and waves of love and peace I experience are just as vast as all that came before. And I realize, truly, properly, and fully for the first time, in a very deep existential way, that I am okay and that I am not alone and that everything will be okay because we will get through this together.
And I open my eyes and Jessica is standing beside me and I realize that she is the voice that is larger than galaxies and the being who is older than those who are older than time, and I realize that we will get through this together. We always have. We always will. Her and I, forever together, forever in love from the time she called to me when I was falling and alone, a time long before the world was formed, until the time longer after this world is gone. And then after that as well.