snowballs from a nebula

I blinked to clear the stars clouding my vision, but those pinpricks of distant eternity only bore down upon me with greater fervour. The universe continued to expand and I expanded with it, my bones stretching apart. I was a constellation, newly born, but no frozen snapshot of legend. My breast rose and fell, blood rushed through the intricacies of my arteries and veins. My fingers danced, searching for what filled the vacuum.

When I woke, I would remember nothing but for now I wandered the fields of creation, lost within my element.

My figure had become translucent, the field of atoms spread so thinly that when light passed through me it refracted less and thus, less of me was revealed. I was like a ghost, a physical, breathing ghost.

I swirled the dust-choked void around my fingers and in the palm of my hand I watched a desert storm building, tiny but ferocious. I kept it spinning and it called in more of the material around us and swelled as it did so, a feasting glutton. Dimly, I remembered that through the eyes of an astoundingly delicate telescope, like that of the drifting Herschel or Spitzer, Hubble even, I would gaze upon a kaleidoscopic rainbow of colour, marbling the darkness pressed upon me. My retinas processed only only the brilliance of starlight, a blinking sea of eyes. Were I awake it would have unnerved me beyond capability, but here I ignored it and focused on the storm, trying to crush it with my free hand.

Compressed, it swirled with greater vivacity and continued to grow the more I pressed upon it. I watched the light of molten rock bathe my palms in a golden glow, pulling in the dormant wasteland around us and continuing to swell.

I thought of winter, of walking to the park with my older brother, collecting snow and with our fingers pressing it into spheres. A month into the new year and the grass was smothered in the sediment of a blizzard the night before. While our parents cleared the doors and the drive, we wondered off to see how big our snowballs could get.

They became boulders and expanded, spinning, blasting light into my eyes. Hours later, we had exhausted the park and I thought a giant bit a chunk out of a mountain and laid it before us, still fresh with glittering summit snow.

Enthralled, I watched it grow larger, a life of its own, its molten skin always stretching. Now an asteroid, now a blazing moon.

Protoplanet. Dwarf planet. Mesoplanet. Growing.

With my bare hands, I birthed a celestis.