It is quiet and still now. I feel a great calm spread through me; a chill extending from my core in a gentle humming wave out to my finger tips. My breathing is deep and the only thing I can hear.

Inhale.

The great expanse before me is a chalkboard. I can remember chalkboards covered in lines and symbols. It all seemed so exciting then: the discovery, the sense of progress. We were taking the universe and breaking it down to its basest forms, and then building it back up again. There were real answers, then. Solutions. Outcomes just waiting to be found, like childhood games of hide and seek.

Her name was Jane, and she was my first friend. She lived a couple or so houses up the street. We used to play tag, insofar as only two children can play tag, and hide and seek. Hide and Seek. We weren't very good at it then, hiding behind the same tree every time. I'd come around the trunk and she'd squeal as though it was the most surprising and delightful thing in the world that I should find her there. Two feet from where we started, behind the only tree.

Exhale.

She moved away when I was seven. She's probably out there somewhere right now, in the huge green and blue dot right in the center of my chalkboard. I hope that she is. I hope that, despite all odds, one of the photons hitting my eye from the middle of that vast green blob bounced off her. I'm sure it did. I can feel it.

Inhale.

I feel a jostling as my blob rattles from side to side. I can't tell anymore if that's the calamity's doing or the air supply, but it appears to steady.

I don't want to turn my head, but I would if I could, and I'm glad that I can't. I don't want to see them strapped next to me and still. Already cold. Together forever, I'm alone.

Exhale.

The calamity shakes me again more roughly, but it does nothing to shake my calm. I am beyond the calamity, above it.

Those of the green, when they spoke to me, warned me of the coming of the Calamity. They told me of His effects, and His way. They could do but talk, and so they were silenced.

They put me here, in His path, but it was not their fault. They are forgiven.

Inhale.

As He shakes me harder and harder I raise one mighty gloved hand and blot out the entirety of Southern America. I wave my second hand through the Atlantic and feel the water run through my fingers. I can feel the tides lapping against them, the ebb and flow of a sharp numbness. I grab a handful of soil and turn it over in my hand and can feel the sun beating down on me during a hot summer afternoon. The bright light shining through the sparse leaves on the trees warming me to my core as I turn and look towards its light. The earth in my hands a moist clay causing my hands to dampen as I squeeze it into my palm. I've never squeezed anything so hard as this.

Summer gives way to a crisp fall evening, Halloween, which is always colder than you prepared for. I'm shivering in my costume as I look out into the night sky, look towards the stars, and the taste of a single juicy apple floods my mouth causing cold juice to run down my chin. I've never tasted anything so sweet as this.

It's shaking me so hard now I can barely see and the chalk stars are drawing their lines along the blackboard carving out symbols and patterns I don't have time to understand but I wish I did. I've never been more alone than this and I'm shaking so hard I can't find the way to talk anymore and all I want to do is talk and listen and hear. I reach out to the green and want to stretch my hands all the way down and hold on to it to something to stop the shaking I want to be down there I don't want to be here I dont want to be here i dont want to be here