text: It came before. Before time would have any concept or meaning. Before matter burned and cooked and crystalized into any quantifiable form. Out of the impossibly ancient swirling dusts of creation it slowly, inexorably gestated. It was not created, it was not willed nor wanted into existence, it simply was not, and then was. How this came to be, when there was nothing, even it could not know. There were not words to form ideas for it to ponder such existence. In all the great nothing, it simply now was. It has no eyes; there was not yet light for it to see with. It has no shape or form in any meaningful way, there was nothing, and it was formed out of the swirling nothing. If matter existed, if space was defined in any meaningful way, it would have been more vast than any concept of modern measurement could possibly describe. Alone; adrift the infinite, endless void it was all, it was the only one of its kind; or any other; more than that, more than anything else it formed a thought, that thought. The first thought. "I am alone". The concept of alone, the first act of creation, the first words ever given form, trillions of years before the first star would set alight; so far before anything capable of conscious thought would possibly speak a primordial language. The very concept of thought, of existence, of this endless formless being was given life, and it was in the thought. It was the thought. "I am alone." If time could be measured then, it would be in aeons. Each word of that first thought billions of years in forming. The burning, twisting embers of each syllable flowing from the void, forming the first sparks of energy that might one day decay into matter to drift coldly beyond the stars. I. It now was. The first principle of existence could now be, it existed, then with that thought the possibility of existing formed with it. It was, and therefore all could be. Am. If it was born of nothing, then this concept made the nothing into something new. It coming to be drew the infinite nothing tighter and tighter, and in the nothing it now was. With this word the the concept of being, the very notion of acting, doing, interacting established itself. Change was possible. 'I' gave form. 'Am' gave motion to that form. But not yet. Alone. With this final word it reached out and felt across infinite space, searching for one like it, for anything other then self, for anything to interact with and found only the void from which it came. The concept of self meant nothing, for there was nothing else. But this differentiation of it from the endless nothing was in itself the first act of creation. It created itself by this thought, formed over countless millennia. Alone meant more. For in this moment, it gave the possibility for something else to exist. The concept of self must inexorably imply the concept of not self, of other, and in this time before time thought and form were one. The first God, in its now formed state now knew what it was. The embers of its first act of creation, of its own birth, drifted slowly out into the nothing, forming and collecting and condensing down into endless galaxies. Time and space made out of the detritus of its own formation, swirling and drifting and fading as the universe spread out from it. The first God screamed.