Be still.

She traced the words slowly against the smooth ceiling. Her finger shook in the air. She tried to stop it, but she was too tired.

Be still.

She tried to imagine the words in large black print, spreading out across her field of vision, growing bigger and bigger until they engulfed the entire world and all she saw was the dark middle of the letter s. Sometimes her thoughts raced so quickly she thought they would leave her behind entirely, so she had begun trying to calm her mind by erasing it of all thought for a few moments at a time.

Be still.

Stillness was startling. The absence of all movement was more shocking than its presence, no matter how sudden. The only motion she was aware of came from within herself. She was painfully conscious of the pulse of her blood, the filling and emptying of her lungs, the tiny throbbing itch on the bottom of her foot. She decided to try to relax completely. Starting with her toes, she examined her awareness of each digit and limb individually: the shape of it, the veins, nerves, and bones within it, how it would move were it in motion. By the time she got to her face, she was melting, dissolving into the mattress beneath her. She trickled through the many floors between her and the ground and dripped into the grass, down between the tiny spaces between the particles of soil. Some of her was absorbed immediately; the rest of her continued down, following the paths gravity pointed out to her, not falling or sinking but allowing herself to be pulled along.

By the time she reached the first plate of rock, many feet below the surface where she had lain before she melted, she no longer possessed any semblance of a form. She was not even the remnants of a girl. She was only a consciousness. She passed through the rock, examining the layers of time it held as she went. It occurred to her that she was no longer moving straight down through the earth, but rather closing in on its center from all sides. No longer forced to exist inside the small body of a human being, she realized just how vast she was. She explored great underground caves and solid stone sheets simultaneously. There was life down here—pale, blind life that crawled and swam without color or sight. But there was other life as well. Life that was no longer alive; life that only existed because the hard layers of the earth had created a prison of preservation around it so it was not allowed to decay. She could examine them for a heartbeat or an eternity, or a heartbeat of eternity, but was there a difference? In this bodiless state she could not tell time apart from itself. She could not tell it apart from herself.

Down, down, down forever and ever and ever. There was no end to how deep within the earth she could go. At least she thought she was within the earth. She could not be sure of anything without her body to tell her. But she could sense a ponderousness around her; a sense of weary heaviness so great that she thought it would make her cry were she still in her body. She had not realized how tired the world was, how much grief it carried. It was more tired than she was of the thing inside her head that made her whole body pound and erased thoughts just as she was on the verge of grasping them. She would have pitied it if she did not know those same feelings herself. But she did, and so while she sympathized, she also felt the slightest touch of scorn.

She became aware suddenly that she was travelling faster and faster toward something that would be very large if it was not pressed so tightly into itself. The core of the earth? she wondered. She was approaching it so rapidly that it was useless to guess about where she was—she would be there before she reached a satisfactory conclusion. She thought she should brace herself for the impact and then remembered that there would be no impact. She would only find herself there. But as this thought occurred to her, a sudden blow from somewhere struck her with such force that it was almost painful, even in her bodiless state. It was something she had never felt before. The closest she could come to describe it, were she to describe it, was to compare it to how she had felt when they first told her about the hostile lump of herself living in her head, and even that was nothing like this. This was something worse than any physical pain, caused by the lump or otherwise, and worse than any emotional pain, though it wasn’t emotional pain either. It lasted for a second that might have been forever. A frantic beeping, like a small machine that had lost its mind, elbowed its way into her consciousness. Other presences fluttered around her and were gone. She was shrinking, being pressed into herself like the core of the earth—the force of everything was crushing her so tightly that she would disappear under its weight—and then she exploded.

All of her senses returned to her. She could see and hear and feel and smell and taste the entire world: not the earth, but the universe. The feeling of being compressed into terrible smallness was so far away that she thought it must have happened in a different lifetime. It was a tiny, forgettable moment of pain that was a necessary part of the journey here (for she was sure she had arrived at her destination). Even the vastness she had felt before the smallness was insignificant compared to what she was now. The entirety of creation was in and around and beneath her. She balanced a star on her fingertip and it stung her wonderfully.

But there was someone else here, beside her and the universe. She searched for the source of the new Presence and could not find it. Gradually she realized that it was calling her name. She turned toward the sound and discovered that it was coming from the forgotten star resting on her finger.

Who are you? she asked. The Presence was silent and she knew it was waiting for her to answer her own question. So she brought the star closer to her face and squinted at it.

And then the star was bigger than itself, bigger than the universe, bigger even than her. She saw multitudes of other universes within it, and more worlds than she had ever imagined. She saw herself, without her body and without the lump in her head—herself as she was always intended to be. She spoke, and this time it was like she had never spoken before.

“I know you,” she said.

The Presence smiled.

She wanted to exist only in the wonderfulness of its smile forever. “Is this where you live?” she asked. There was no questioning where she was supposed to live; she could not imagine being anywhere where the Presence was not. But as she glanced at the mark on her finger where the star had stung her when she first touched it, she thought that perhaps this was not her final destination after all.

“Come with me,” the Presence said.

She put her hand in His.