There is a time between then and now; between existing and waiting to exist.

It’s not a time of nothingness- nothingness rarely exists- just a moment when tiny inconceivable atoms coalesce in preparation for…something.

It’s hard to imagine what these energized atoms may someday become.

A chick newly hatched from a yolky egg

A baby swaddled in blue

A cherry tree

A mouse

A bed of ebbing mycelium

I wonder sometimes about this pre-structural moment, where something has yet to form.

How is it that ‘nothing’ becomes something?

What dictates a mass of atoms becoming a living breathing thing, or just a lump of rock?

What was I before I became this body?

I wonder if there was ever a moment, even the slightest fraction of a moment, where these dissipated parts of me almost became something else.

Could I have turned out to be another thing entirely?

A grove of olive trees whose fruits become the fragrant oil that flavours the dishes of the family that would never be my own. Or perhaps I could’ve been the smallest of creatures, destined to only roam the earth for one sunrise before my body decayed and my atoms redistributed.

I wonder a lot I think, more than necessary, about what comes before and what comes after. I wonder about how I became what I became and what I may someday be when this body runs it’s course.

I have a theory that at least some of me, a handful of atoms that make up my limbs, once belonged to the ocean. That maybe, at one point, I resided in the inky depths of the ocean, my lithe body untethered in the churning current. Perhaps that would explain my affinity for water and salt, my longing to wash up on unfamiliar shores.

Or maybe, after this, I’ll become something I hate. I’ll become a venomous viper that snakes on forest floors in search of prey, or maybe parts of me will redistribute into smaller increments and slip into other human forms. A patch of my essence could someday become the stomach lining in a body of a person the world will come to hate, to fear.

Those thoughts often make me think too critically of the underlying potential for evilness I may possess. It makes me look for glimpses of past evilness in the people I see today, like maybe those historical figures we wish to be nothing like somehow reincarnated into people today.

This is why I dismiss these thoughts as often as I can, lest they sour my perception of everything I see in this world.

Instead I would hope, maybe somewhat in part to the variability of humanity, that I will not be a human at all in my next life.

I would like to be diced and scattered amongst the earth, the atoms that once made up the cells of my muscles turned into writhing tree roots, my fingernails into butterflies.

I never thought too much about the science behind it all, preferring to segregate my childish notions from the logic and reason I study.

(Deep down I know my thoughts are foolish, if not naive. I did, after all, fantasize so much about this study of atoms that I made it my career)

No, for now I will fantasize about the things I once was and the things I could be.

This body, though not my preferred image, will still be well taken care of despite my disdain of the human form. Each and every atom will be accounted for and carefully maintained until this body expires and they scatter some place else. Wherever they end up, good or bad, I hope they have at least some memory of their time with me. I hope that they know I thought of them, what they were before and what they will someday be.

All I know is that there is a time between then and now, between existing and waiting to exist and I have experienced them both .