Instructions for Being Here

You have been selected 
for temporary assignment 
to a rotating rock. 

First, forget everything. 

Because remembering 
would ruin the surprise. 

You will receive a body 
made of water, 
salt, 
and old stars. 

It will be impressive at first. 

Hands. 
Eyelashes. 

Later you will discover 
the lower back. 

We apologise in advance. 

You will also be given 
a brain. 

The brain is useful 
for solving problems 
and creating additional problems 
when none are available. 

It may wake you at 3:17 a.m. 
to remind you of something embarrassing 
you said in 2009. 

Do not engage. 

This is spam. 

Upon arrival 
you will experience 
a sensation called being someone. 

This is temporary. 

You will also be assigned a name. 

Answer to it. 

But wear it loosely. 

People will use it 
to call you across rooms, 
to blame you, 
to love you, 
to write it on envelopes 
containing both good news 
and invoices. 

But remember: 

you were alive 
before anyone called you 
anything. 

None of this is your true name. 

Your true name cannot be carried 
by words. 

There will be moments 
when the world feels 
too solid. 

When stone is only stone. 

When the sky is only weather. 

When another person 
seems impossibly far away. 

This is part of the forgetting. 

Be patient. 

The veil is thinner 
than it appears. 

Nothing is still. 

The mountains are moving. 

The oceans are moving. 

The cells in your body 
are replacing themselves 
while you insist 
you are the same person 
you were yesterday. 

You might fall in love. 

This is when one human 
becomes unusually interested 
in another human’s 
sleeping noises, 
minor opinions, 
and preferred method 
of loading a dishwasher. 

It is considered sacred. 

Do not mock it. 

Actually, mock it a little. 

Sacred things survive jokes. 

Say I love you 
before the moment becomes cinematic. 

Most important moments 
are poorly lit. 

Do not wait. 

You will sometimes feel 
an ache 
with no object. 

Do not hurry 
to cure it. 

It is the memory 
of belonging 
to something 
without edges. 

You will search for this belonging 
in lovers, 
in houses, 
in cities, 
in gods, 
in the face 
you see in the mirror. 

Search. 

The searching is sacred too. 

You may spend years 
trying to find yourself. 

This is considered 
an honourable activity. 

Eventually you will discover 
that the searcher 
was the thing being searched for. 

Do not announce this over dinner. 

People are trying 
to eat. 

But know this: 

what you seek 
is not elsewhere. 

It is the quiet 
beneath your seeking. 

There will be ordinary days. 

Many of them. 

Do not underestimate these. 

A cup on a table. 

Sunlight on the floor. 

Someone calling your name 
from another room. 

Fresh bread 
while it is still warm. 

Strawberries. 

An afternoon 
with nowhere important to be. 

These are not interruptions 
to the sacred. 

They are the sacred 
wearing work clothes. 

Pay attention. 

You will be tempted 
to seek revelation 
only in mountains, 
temples, 
visions, 
and stars. 

But the infinite 
has hidden itself everywhere. 

In dishwater. 

In breath. 

In tired hands. 

In laughter 
arriving at exactly 
the wrong moment. 

In the sound 
someone makes 
when they are trying 
not to cry. 

When possible, 
sit beside someone 
who is sad 
without trying to improve them. 

Bring snacks. 

Snacks are one of the few technologies 
Earth has nearly perfected. 

You will be expected 
to know what you are doing. 

This is perhaps 
Earth’s greatest misunderstanding. 

Nobody knows. 

You will make mistakes. 

Some will wound others. 

Some will wound you. 

Repair what you can. 

Ask forgiveness. 

Begin again. 

The divine has never required 
your perfection. 

Only your presence. 

You will lose people. 

Nothing we say here 
will make that easy. 

When someone you love 
leaves their body, 
you may feel 
the whole world 
has made a terrible mistake. 

Let yourself feel this. 

Grief is love 
learning a new shape. 

Speak to the dead 
if you need to. 

Love does not become foolish 
because a body is absent. 

There will be moments 
when you remember who you are. 

Perhaps while holding 
a sleeping child. 

Perhaps while swimming 
alone at dusk. 

Perhaps when music 
enters you so completely 
there is no one left 
to listen. 

Perhaps standing alone 
in a kitchen 
while rain moves 
against the dark glass. 

For one impossible second 
you may forget 
to be separate 
from anything. 

In those moments 
do not reach for explanation. 

Explanation is smaller 
than experience. 

Just stay. 

Try strawberries. 

Swim naked at least once 
if local laws 
and water temperature permit. 

Waste afternoons. 

Stand in the rain. 

Taste peaches. 

Laugh until 
you briefly forget 
the shape of your own life. 

You came here 
to become intimate 
with the temporary. 

To love what disappears. 

To touch what cannot stay. 

To say yes 
to a world 
already leaving. 

For several decades 
you will carry a universe 
inside a skeleton 
and complain about parking. 

It will be magnificent. 

And when your time comes 
to return, 
the body may resist 
the door it was born 
to pass through. 

Be tender with it. 

It carried you 
all this way. 

Before departure 
you will be asked 
to return all borrowed materials: 

your bones, 
your language, 
the face you believed was yours, 
the body 
you called your own. 

Do not worry. 

Nothing truly belonging to you 
can be confiscated. 

You may keep 
the astonishment. 

Before you leave, 
look once more 
at the world. 

At the astonishing arrangement 
of light and matter. 

At the hands 
you called yours. 

At the faces 
that taught you 
how to break 
and how to open. 

At the ordinary room 
where something extraordinary 
once happened 
and nobody noticed. 

At the sky 
you stopped looking at 
because it was always there. 

At the people 
you loved badly, 
beautifully, 
briefly, 
for as long as you knew how. 

Before you leave, 
a figure with no face 
may ask: 

Did you understand 
what any of it meant? 

The recommended answer is: 

Not remotely. 

But I laughed. 

I was embarrassed. 

I stood in the rain. 

I tasted peaches. 

I ate bread 
while it was still warm. 

I wasted afternoons. 

I loved. 

I lost. 

I began again. 

For a little while 
I was a window 
the universe looked through. 

Then the figure may ask: 

Did you remember 
why you came? 

Tell the truth. 

Say: 

No. 

But once, 
standing alone in a kitchen 
while rain moved 
against the dark glass, 

I forgot to be separate 
from anything. 

That seemed important. 

At the final gate 
you may be asked 
what you brought back. 

Do not say trophies. 

Say: 

I was here. 

I paid attention 
sometimes. 

I loved 
as much as I knew how. 

There is no correct answer. 

There was only ever 
the experience 
of answering. 

Then step forward. 

The figure will stamp 
your papers. 

The door will open. 

And perhaps, finally, 
you will remember: 

you were never sent away. 

You were never outside. 

You were never separate 
from the thing 
you spent your whole life 
trying to return to. 

You only entered time 
for a little while 

so eternity 
could know 
what it felt like 
to be here.

Through the Cracks of the World

The main argument against the existence of God is not intellectual, but visceral: the cruelty of the world. The sheer, apparently unjustifiable weight of suffering. The innocent broken, the beautiful destroyed, the good extinguished while the cruel prosper.

Enough grief can make the universe appear indifferent. Enough injustice can make the idea of a benevolent creator seem almost obscene. Many people have looked at what has happened to them, or to those they love, and thought: Nothing good would have created this.

And I think there is something sickening in trying to explain suffering away. To call every horror a lesson, every loss part of some hidden plan, can become another kind of cruelty. Some things should be mourned before they are interpreted. Some things may never be justified from where we stand.

And yet I cannot bring myself to believe that this is the whole story.

Because something strange happens within existence: things become. Matter gathers into life. Life becomes consciousness. Consciousness becomes love, imagination, music, sacrifice—and the strange capacity to care about suffering that is not our own. The universe does not merely persist; somehow, it unfolds.

Perhaps we make a mistake when we imagine each life as an entirely separate thing—a solitary flame appearing for a moment and then disappearing into darkness. Perhaps everything participates in something immeasurably larger than itself, connected in ways our individual minds can barely glimpse. Perhaps what seems final from within one life is not final from the perspective of the whole.

And perhaps—only perhaps—within whatever ultimate reality there is, suffering may seem different from how it does to us now. Not unreal. Not meaningless. Not something to be dismissed. But not the final measure of existence either.

There is another mystery. The horror of suffering seems itself to point beyond suffering. Why does cruelty repulse us? Why does injustice awaken something so fierce within? The pain of another being can cross the invisible boundary between their life and ours and become, somehow, our concern. Their wound enters our imagination. Their grief alters us.

Compassion is born there.

The existence of suffering can harden a person, but it can also break open the walls of the self. It can make us gentler. It can awaken courage. The sight of malevolence can become the reason we refuse to be malevolent. The existence of injustice can summon actions that heal and make the world better. Darkness can be transformed, strangely enough, into the light.

None of this makes suffering good. A wound does not become beautiful simply because something beautiful may one day grow around it.

But beauty does grow there.

Again and again, in the ruins of things, people love one another. Someone stays beside the dying. Someone forgives what seemed unforgivable. Someone protects a stranger. Someone creates music in a devastated city. Someone plants a tree whose shade they will never sit beneath.

And sometimes, rising through all the brutality of existence, there appears a beauty so strange, so gratuitous, so far beyond what mere survival seems to require, that it feels almost like a revelation—as though something were shining through the cracks of the world.

Perhaps the deepest mystery is not that there is darkness.

Perhaps it is that, within the darkness, anything reaches towards the light at all.

Three Grains of Fairy Dust

One autumn evening Oswin and Elowen climbed to the hill above the forest. Below them the trees had turned the colour of fire, and beyond them the human village glowed with little yellow windows. They had met there many times before, but that evening Elowen was unusually quiet.

“What troubles you?” Oswin asked.

The wind stopped.

Elowen pulled her hand from his.

“Oswin.”

The Fairy Queen appeared from between two trees.

She was tall, dressed in moth wings and moonlight. Her crown was made from the antlers of a white deer.

“You have made a forbidden promise to my daughter,” she said.

Elowen whispered, “Please.”

But her mother only raised one finger and touched it to Oswin’s forehead.

Oswin fell.

When he woke, he remembered his home.

He remembered the village, the mill, the church, the lamb he had once lost in the forest.

He remembered everything.

Except Elowen.

She found him the following morning beside the millpond.

Oswin was mending a broken fence.

“Oswin,” she said softly.

He looked up.

There was no recognition in his face.

She had imagined anger. Fear. Disgust.

She had not imagined politeness.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Do you know me?”

He studied her.

“I am sorry.”

“You once knew me.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

He frowned.

“You loved me.”

Elowen wiped her eyes quickly.

Oswin lowered his hammer.

But then he said gently, “I’m sorry, but I think I would remember that.”

Later, when the sun had set, Elowen went to the Fairy Queen.

She did not kneel.

“Give him back to me.”

“No.”

“You stole me from his memory.”

The Queen opened her hand.

Upon her palm lay three grains of golden dust.

“What is this?”

The Queen blew softly across her palm. The grains trembled slightly.

“Each grain will restore one memory.”

Elowen stared at them.

“One memory?”

“One moment. No more.”

“I have hundreds.”

“Then choose three.”

“That is impossible.”

The Queen said nothing.

Elowen took the grains.

For three nights she wandered through the forest.

Which memories could make a man remember love?

Their first meeting?

Their first kiss?

The evening he made his promise?

She feared choosing wrongly.

Perhaps she should give him the happiest moments.

Perhaps the most beautiful.

Perhaps the most painful.

On the fourth night she went to Oswin.

He was sitting outside his cottage, peeling an apple.

“You again,” he said.

“Yes.”

He did not sound displeased.

Elowen sat beside him.

“I have something to show you.”

She placed the first grain of fairy dust upon her fingertip.

“What is that?”

“A memory.”

Before he could answer, she touched it to his brow.

The world flashed gold.

Oswin remembered a hawthorn tree.

He saw himself younger, muddy from the forest path.

He saw Elowen sitting among the roots, healing a wounded sparrow.

The bird opened its wings and flew from her hands.

Then she felt his gaze upon her.

She looked up.

Their eyes met.

And in the next instant there was nothing beneath the hawthorn but fallen blossom.

The vision vanished.

Oswin gasped.

He looked at Elowen.

“That was you.”

“Yes.”

He touched his forehead.

“I remember.”

Hope leapt inside her.

“Do you remember loving me?”

His face changed.

“No.”

The hope died.

Elowen kept the second grain for seven days.

She considered their first kiss.

It had happened during a storm.

They had hidden beneath an oak while rain crashed through the branches.

Then lightning struck the hilltop.

Oswin kissed her.

For the rest of her life she would remember the taste of rain.

Surely that memory would restore him.

But on the seventh evening, as she approached his cottage, she saw Oswin standing beneath an apple tree with his little sister.

The girl was crying.

Oswin knelt and tied the ribbon on her shoe.

“You will fall if you run with it loose,” he said.

“I don’t care.”

“You will when you scrape your knees.”

The girl sniffed, but let him tie it.

Elowen stopped.

And suddenly she knew what the second memory must be.

Not the kiss.

Not the storm.

Something smaller.

She waited until Oswin was alone.

Then she used the second grain.

He remembered winter.

A brutal winter.

Snow had buried the roads. The river had frozen. Food was scarce.

Elowen had brought him a silver apple from the orchards.

“Eat,” she had said to him. “You have had nothing.”

Oswin broke the apple in half.

One half for her.

One half for him.

It was not enough for either.

They ate it anyway.

The memory faded.

Oswin stared at the ground.

“I remember being hungry.”

“Yes.”

“And you gave me what you had.”

“We gave it to each other.”

Oswin reached towards her hand.

Then stopped.

“I still do not remember loving you.”

“I know.”

“I am sorry.”

One grain remained.

Elowen carried it for a month.

Then two.

Winter came.

Oswin began to seek her out.

Not because he remembered.

Because he liked her.

They walked together.

He asked her questions he had asked years before.

Why do fairy rings grow?

Where do swallows go in winter?

Can stars hear us?

She gave him different answers this time.

Sometimes he made her laugh in exactly the way he once had.

Sometimes he said something entirely new.

And Elowen began to understand that remembering a person was not the same as knowing them.

One evening he said, “Perhaps you should use the last memory.”

“I am afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That it will not be enough.”

She had always thought the answer would be their first night together.

Or the first time he said her name as though it were something precious.

But suddenly she remembered another day.

A quiet day.

A day on which nothing had happened at all.

She brought Oswin to the hill where he had once promised to love her until the end of time.

“This place feels familiar,” he said.

She held the last grain of fairy dust.

He watched it glitter upon her finger.

“Is this the moment when I told you I loved you?”

“No.”

“Our first kiss?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“The moment I knew.”

Elowen touched the dust to his forehead.

It was summer.

Oswin was asleep beneath the hawthorn.

Nothing extraordinary was happening.

There were no kisses.

No promises.

No moonlight.

Elowen sat beside him.

A beetle crawled across his sleeve.

She moved it carefully onto a leaf.

Oswin slept.

She looked at his face.

And suddenly, without reason, without magic, without anyone speaking, she understood that the world contained one particular soul whose existence had become the centre of her own happiness.

She had not wanted anything from him.

She had not asked him to stay.

She had simply looked at him sleeping beneath a tree and thought:

There you are.

The memory ended.

Elowen waited.

But he shook his head.

“I am sorry.”

Her last hope broke.

“You still do not remember.”

“No.”

She turned away.

“Elowen.”

She stopped.

He took her hand.

“I do not remember loving you.”

She looked back at him.

“But I remember being loved.”

The forest became very quiet.

Elowen stared at him.

“I cannot give you your old love,” she whispered.

Oswin lifted her hand and kissed her fingers.

“Then perhaps,” he said, “we should not try to find it.”

“What should we do instead?”

“We begin again.”

Oswin did not remember the moments with the girl beneath the hawthorn, or the rain upon their first kiss, or the promise that had once cost him everything.

But the hawthorn remembered.

The stream remembered.

The birds remembered.

And somewhere in the deep earth, three tiny grains of golden dust remembered.