Yes, I Am

Chapter Twenty One.

"When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are to become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No... don't blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away."

-Louis de Bernière

Have you ever looked up at the sky and wondered how it all came into existence? The inky blackness of an endless sky, the cool night air that makes the stars shimmer, the meteorite that enters the earth's atmosphere and breaks into a million pieces of interstellar dust, leaving a trail of fire in its wake. The moon, the sun, the clouds- our galaxy.

It didn't happen in a second. It took a lot of time. The dense singularity of nothingness expanded itself to form time, space and energy. Atoms began to form like a newborn baby opening its fists for the first time. Millions and millions of gas clouds and star clusters clashed and burnt, some disappearing into bursts of flames, others merging into each other. Explosions of starlight. Fusion of atoms so intense, they spontaneously combusted. Collision of forces that shook the edges of the spiral arms of the newly forming galaxy. 

Something unexplained happens and the gravity gets disturbed. Gas and dust starts to draw inwards and form clumps. The collapsing clump starts to rotate and flatten into a disc of molecular clouds. It rotates faster and faster, attracting more material, pulling everything inwards, until a hot, dense core is formed. When it is hot enough, hydrogen atoms begin to fuse, producing helium and energy. After millions of years, a bipolar flow erupts from the protostar and blasts away the remaining gas and dust.

Congratulations, you just witnessed the formation of a star.

And then the sea of cosmic particles and radiation begin to cool, settling down into a smooth flow. Until there's another shift in the gravity and another star begins to form.

That was what being with Caleb was like. It was like witnessing the formation of galaxies.