Interlude

"Hello Darkness my old friend / I've come to talk to you again."
- Simon and Garfunkel, The Sound of Silence

That night I finished the new machine.

It was ready, and I was ready.

There had been too many false starts, too many disasters.

This time it would be right, it would work, and no one would be hurt.

But first I had to shave.

I had to shave off all the hairs, all the years: the grey ones, then the brown ones, and then the blond ones, until all that was left was pale pink skin.

It is 7:59 PM and I am ready to be reborn.

I've connected everything: hose to the machine, wires to laptops, laptops to machine, pipe to pipe, everything.

Now I begin, I flip the switch that sends the signal to the laptops which sends the signal to the machine which stutters and sparks and, finally, lives.

For a moment I hear the low throbbing hum of my childhood summer nights: the sound of an electric fan, the sound of the Universe.

For a moment I can see them being born, the tiny worlds in the metal womb.

They are beautiful and new and then it is 8:00 PM and everything implodes.

The lights stutter.

There is a blinding noise, and then a deafening light, and then darkness.

I am surrounded by its claws and the acrid smoke and the antifreeze and water that is gushing from my stillborn universe, mixing with my tears and misery.

"What the hell was that?"
"It's the aliens!"
"The power's out!"

Wikipedia has this to say on the subject of snow. Snow, it says, is a type of precipitation within the Earth's atmosphere in the form of crystalline water ice, consisting of a multitude of snowflakes that fall from clouds. Since snow is composed of small ice particles, it is a granular material. It has an open and therefore soft structure, unless packed by external pressure. Snowflakes come in a variety of sizes and shapes.

This is what it doesn't say. Snowflakes begin high above the world. They are microscopic, frigid, identical. Eventually, they become too heavy for their areal birthplace. Then they fall. They fall. The falling is important. As they fall they accumulate water molecules. Every snow flake does this. Ten to the Eighteenth water molecules. What you should remember is the pattern. Where they fall, when they fall, the humidity and temperature of the atmosphere as they travel; these things determine the pattern. By the time a snowflake reaches the earth, traveled its meandering path, it is unique among all other snowflakes. In this way, I used to tell myself, a snow flake is much like a person.

A snowflake is much like a person. Like a battered motivational poster, I still tell myself that sometimes, but now I've learned the crucial difference. Every snowflake has a pattern you can see, a pattern you can understand. Every snowflake is beautiful.

And so tomorrow I will start again...