Questions I Want to Ask in the Early Hours

Do you think it’s possible that we met before we met?

Before there was ‘you’ or ‘I’ or ‘me’; before everything that is, was

drifting motes of dust in the birthing of a star, were we

pulled together by the same gravity?

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Do you think it was likely, before the expanding universe pulled us apart, our separate

ways in the great cosmos, whizzing around the stars,

we knew that – one day –

we would be a piece of each other’s beating hearts?

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Do you reckon – maybe – after I’d been a billion years a nebula, and you’d been a black hole and a volcano and a trillion different bacteria,

and we somehow coalesced here, amidst the great cosmic disorder;

did we know we were getting closer?'

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Do you think it happened, before ‘you’ were ‘you’,

the first beings to taste air or dirt or take steps, as we climbed

out of the great primordial soup;

did my great-great-great ancestor think that your great-great-great ancestor

was cute?

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Do you think, before the first brain, before the syntax and analysis,

before math came back to say that

– statistically – we shouldn’t exist

before the dream of language, to put a word to love –

do you think we knew what it was?

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Do you wonder if, eventually, our atoms grow weary of working together?

our bones get tired of our skin, and all the bits disperse,

return to Earth, return to the soup and stars and another birth;

when we’re hurling through the stratosphere to find the next adventure –

do you think we’ll remember?

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