Flash Fiction
I was supposed to be writing about the bright decorative lights hanging so festively on the roof of the neighboring apartment complex as if it was Christmas, and yet it is Christmas, but the lights aren’t meant for Santa Claus. Regardless, the pantone yellow fairy lights go well with the night and with the sleepy, green, rooftop plants.
The moon. The spotted, reflective moon. There is something so inherent, so intrinsic, so human about the moon. It feels so distant, so removed, a sentinel standing vigil, the stuff made for human imagination, made to harbor and foster stories and creativity. Or a stuff made of human imagination, a signal reflector endowed with life by human creativity.
Or is it? Is it humans that give life or life that gives humans? Is life a human concept or are humans a concept of life?
The secondhand light of the moon falls so peacefully, its gravitational pull rocks us to and fro, far older than humanity itself. Maybe it is the moon that makes us, and indeed it has a part in making us and everything around us. And in that, maybe we are not all different species and different systems of biotic organisms and abiotic environments; but one species, and one whole, and in that the moon is us, a part of us, a part of humanity, a part of life. And maybe our gut microbiomes are also as much a part of us as we are a part of ourselves, and maybe so are trees and oxygen and the atmosphere. And maybe we are as much microorganisms and towering trees as we are humans. And in that, we can never be empty inside, as we are much more, much, much more than we give ourselves credit.
But are we the moon? Are we as much the moon as the moon is the moon? Are we even a tiny, insignificant part of the moon? Or are we but little and the universe around us vastly larger; and in that we are still and dependent and reliant as we always were.
We are part of a greater whole, but we are also formed of an even larger whole, and in that whole we reside, and to that whole we return, not as conquistadors or valedictorians, but as mutinous organs of a colossal, throbbing organism.