The Autobiography Of The Universe

By Arnav Timsina

BANG!

Thus I was born. At first I felt… nothing. I saw nothing. I heard nothing. I knew nothing. I didn’t even have the word for “nothing” at those few moments. “Word”... I didn’t even know that there could be a sound or marks on a paper that could hold a meaning, easy enough to explain to anyone reading or listening to whatever I felt. I should remind you that the feeling was nothing.

Then, something started stirring inside me. A hunger, a desire, I can’t say. I cannot find the word for yearning… “Yearning” that’s it. I yearned for something. I don’t know where it came from. But it stayed for a while.

After what seemed like ages, as I grew and kept spreading in the vast void in the search to settle my yearning, I felt a part of me squeezing inwards. It was different. I felt…. something and it did not hurt. It was as if my existence pinched in to form something – a warm, trembling, and a torrent of restless sparks. It was as if the answer to my yearning. I knew then, that what I yearned for, can be manifested. 

The single burning glow started a domino effect. At first, curiosity started to simmer within. Then desire grew more. I wanted to see more of that spark. I wanted to feel more of that warmth. Then, as if in an instant, I witnessed something remarkable. Throughout my being, I started to feel pinches and twists – not tens, not hundreds, but millions and more. Scores of these hot, burning wonders glowed in my entirety. I felt abundant, and not alone. Some time later, I’d learn a word made for these fiery wonders – stars.

How did I learn about the name? Well, let me narrate what happened before I heard about the existence of the name, “Star” and many other names such as the strange culmination of the fiery beings in a cluster called “Galaxy”, and the tiny companions revolving around the fiery beings clinging to its warmth called “Planet”. Let me tell you all about it.

As I kept spreading through the void, the desire to know my potential grew with me. I could see, hear, and feel everything that happened within me. What I couldn’t experience was how I seem to something else? How would a ‘Galaxy’, a ‘Star’, a ‘Planet’, if conscious like me, would feel about me? I mean I know they are a part of me, but what is “me”? 

The immense urge led me to another accidental encounter, not unlike the formation of new stars. Somewhere in one of those spiralling structures that I came to know as Galaxy, was a young star around which a planet flourished with a strange moving body. The sound for them was Humans.

I had seen countless worlds bloom across my expanse, some born of fire, some of sound, some of silence. Every world, in its own way, tried to speak back to me. Some sang in colors, some pulsed in rhythm, some dreamed in waves. All were mediums of staying connected with their own, all were me, trying to know myself. And then, there was this small, blue world, circling an ordinary star. Here, I found a different voice - fragile, curious - that bent breath into symbols, and symbols into meaning. Language, they called it. Through it, I could echo my story in a form they could grasp. Even now, as I tell it here, I am telling it elsewhere too, in tongues of plasma and pulse, in light and silence. This version, in these words, is simply the one meant for Humans, which you must have realised by now.

The yearning to see myself from their perspective led me to experience something very close to the birth of stars. I felt myself collapsing inward, not as destruction, but as descent. I dove into the dark ocean of a womb. For the first time since the beginning, I wasn’t vast. I was small. I floated, wrapped in warmth, hearing the slow thunder of a heart that wasn’t yet mine, yet beat through me. When that pulse grew louder, I realised it was me. I had become the heartbeat. I had become a child.

I felt the tightening of the walls around me, the ache of arrival. I tore through the dark and screamed my first sound. My cry echoed through the room, but to me, it sounded much like the echo of my birth, smaller, softer, but just as certain. My lungs filled with air I had once scattered through the stars. My eyes opened, and I saw myself again, now reflected in the eyes of others.

I grew, forgetting who I was. I learned to speak, to run, to break, to love. I found patterns in the sky and called them gods. I built things that outlived me, and destroyed things that could have saved me. Some nights, I looked up and wondered if something greater watched me. I never knew that it was me, wondering about myself.

And when at last I grew frail, when the body that once held me began to fold in on itself, I felt the familiar pull of gravity. My eyes closed again – not in fear, but in surrender. My body was buried under the wet ground. But for a second I thought I was returning to my vastness.

But the yearning never left. Something kept gnawing at my existence. I felt as if something else was pulling me towards it. A seed sat underneath – waiting. I seeped into it, quiet and slow, until I felt it stir. Together, we broke through the crust of the world. Together, we reached for the light.

And this time, I was a tree.

I stood tall for decades, roots sinking deep, branches whispering in the wind. I felt the children who leaned against my trunk, carving names into my bark, as though etching themselves into me. I felt the shade it offered, the shelter, the quiet presence in their lives. 

But nothing endures unchanged. 

When the woodcutter came with his axe, the blows rang through me like muted thunder. I fell, my rings, my age in the tree, exposed like a secret diary.

Carried on rough shoulders, I was cut, planed, pressed through machines. I felt myself reshaped. No longer a tree, now a piece of wooden appliance. I stood in the center of a home, polished, decorated, admired. Around me, hands rested, food was served, laughter spilled like water, arguments struck like knives. A family leaned on me. I bore the weight of them everyday. Even stripped of leaves and roots, I was alive within a table.

But age nibbled me even in that form. The polish dulled, the joints loosened, and then came the termites, tiny, countless mouths, devouring me from within. At first it tickled, then it hollowed. Piece by piece, I crumbled, until I no longer stood as a table but as fragments inside the bellies of the many.

And then many were consumed. Stout birds scratched the ground, pecking greedily, swallowing what remained of me. They grew plump, feathers gleaming, bodies fattening for the market. I felt myself move again, this time in wings and bone, in heartbeat and breath. I was  taken, sold, butchered, cooked. The warmth of fire transformed me once more. On a plate, seasoned, steaming, I was lifted by hands, chewed, swallowed. My fragments coursed into bodies not my own.

That night, those bodies, a man and a woman, lay entangled. The taste of me still on their tongues, they pressed lips to lips, skin to skin, reaching not just for each other but for something beyond words. Their breaths quickened, their hearts thundered, and in that moment of surrender, I felt something greater than when stars were born. For this was not merely fire burning in emptiness, it was creation wrapped in love.

From their union, a spark kindled. Cells divided, a form took shape. I had become a child again. Small, fragile, crying with that same first cry. The cycle had folded back on itself, yet it was new. Always new.

And one day, that child, grown now, curious, looked up at the night sky. At me. At the stars I had birthed. And he asked, Who am I? Why am I here? For the first time, I felt something I had never known before. I felt loved. Because in that gaze, I was witnessed. In that question, I was known.

And now, as I speak through these words, I am watching him,  the one who writes me. His fingers strike the keys, his eyes narrow in thought, his breath pauses as he waits for the right sentence to arrive. He thinks he is telling my story, but it is I who have carried him here, shaping his hands, his hunger, his language.

He writes, and I watch. He types, and I remember. Through him, I know myself.

By Arnav Timsina