Earth to Echo

by Marie Smulczeski

Emitting a pulse out into the air, one reverberating far beyond through the cold space of night... hoping that somewhere in the expanse, it will find your echo.

She closed lids over deep pools of great blue-green, gold-flecked eyes.

It was her heart that called from another world, and if heartbeats can be felt through the firmament, these were laden with the heat-glow of still-burning embers of this creature's inner fire. These pulses were weighted with a yearning from every resonant fiber of the cardiac rhythm which had expounded them.

Fingers, long, opalescent and pale, touched the parallels of the universe holograms she held like luminous pebbles in her palms. Each one felt different with energy, with how its physics was defined, with the kind of life it contained, with the way emotions were felt and relayed from every sensitive being. From higher-dimensional sight she had peered into each of them. She had, one by one, absorbed like a wave of flux the way information flowed out and through her in order to understand them. She had known, thus, every kind of emotion, all kinds of expression, every variation of hope and pain.

But I possess a sadness, she observed, that has created new depth to my being, because something has collapsed inside me.

The energy from this avalanche within her had become extracorporeal, permeating out into the void of teeming particle-antiparticle pairs, causing a hesitation, a shudder ever-so-slight, just before the moment of their annihilation. The universe was moved. She stood, alone under a vast sky, taking in this effect in the immensity. Flickering, the signal became acknowledged by each luminary it swept past in the expanse, and created a tiny question: Have you felt the other one she is looking for?

And the essences in space fueled by fusion, contained by hydrostatic equilibrium, set ablaze a flame within her in her searching, for there is light that exudes from things alive with purpose.

The Ultimate sensed the wind of her signal, her energy, and spoke to her mind in a dream.

"What do you think I am?" it asked.

"You are the spirit containing all spirits," she said. "You are the light inside the glass."

"And what are you?" it asked.

"I am the perceiver," she answered. "The Ultimate filtered through me. I am the glass of form."

"If you could be anything, what would you be?" it asked her.

"Pure spirit. Living somewhere apart from this realm. An alternate world where emotions and feelings between beings are understood without words, and everything is vivid, alive, exuding some kind of fantastic color, shape, or essence, in whatever forms it may take, even some beyond description one could ever say, because the reality of the beings and the world is something beyond. Where there is some deep source of life and light that tells you the truth about the fundamentals of everything when you are in its presence. The Ultimate. Something impossibly beautiful that cannot be described, only experienced... and that one, sole, all-encompassing experience, the secret of connection and being-ness in all the universe, is Love... in its most profound and purest form."

"But you are already something above, holding all worlds."

"I know."

"What will you do if your call is never answered?" it asked.

"I will yearn forever," she said.