Above my head, skirting the cosmic veil,
a comet trails a path in the clear star-lit sky
and dusts the Earth in its wake.
I have always loved and I have always marvelled
at the sight of these glowing and solo travellers
that pass through our solar system,
and so close to Earth that they can be seen with the naked-eye
from the ground, from time to time, on a clear and unclouded night.
I have always been fascinated by what gives a comet its remarkable tail.
I have always dreamed about
what it would be like to be on the surface of a comet
as it passed by Earth, to see our testament oasis
to the infinite possibilities of choice and life,
and to gaze-out in wonder as the comet atomised and fragmented
and floated to Earth like winter snowflakes.

A photograph of the night-sky can never truly capture its beauty;
a camera can see into the depths of space,
but it can only return with an after-image-
a photocopy, a poor-mans facsimile, and representation
about what is truly out there:
colours that we don’t yet have a name for,
forces that dictate the reason for everything
that we don’t yet understand and perhaps never will,
life existing in forms we are incapable of envisioning
because we are not yet ready to see them.
We look longingly at pictures of nebulae, new planets,
moons, shooting-stars, and comets,
because they remind us of ourselves,
and they fore-shadow what we will one day find in the universe:
another and another and another example of complicated
and constantly evolving life-
the evidence of which will come of no surprise
to those who have for centuries believed, looked, read, and listened.

For thousands of years,
humanity has been in the perfect vantage-point
of the astro-auditorium to witness epic changes,
and to ask questions about what they are seeing
and about how the mere witnessing of something that is galactic
and out of our control will fuel the need of someone
to keep watching and finding new pieces to the vast
multi-levelled universal puzzle.
As is customary, to answer multi-faceted questions
you need to employ multi-faceted means of investigation, discovery,
and definition, until one day one layer of the picture
starts to take-shape in a way that could not have been planned,
that is the only way of making sense of what is right in front of you,
that is genuinely new and unthought of before- something like:
what if our universe is not the only universe out there in existence,
and maybe in the grand-scheme of things,
as seen in an infinite image of everything,
our universe is nothing but a puddle.

There is nothing more magical than sitting in a well-lit theatre,
staring at a blank movie-screen,
when suddenly the lights go down around you,
the film-projector turns on and the screen comes alive
with images of advertisements, film-trailers, and movie-teasers,
before getting to the main-event, before the spectacle of magic
that you have paid the price of a ticket to see,
is projected before you- so that you may immerse yourself in it
and come away from it with something that you didn’t arrive with;
just like how you feel when you see the ancient cave-paintings
of our ancestors in the early dwellings and places of importance
that have been discovered in parts of Africa and Australia.
For our entire existence, humanity has looked, learned,
and will continue to look and learn, and record,
and pass-on their discoveries to a new generation
for them to interpret in their own way-
in the same way, that when we look at cave paintings
we see art, our lineage, our humble beginnings;
perhaps our descendants will one day look at all life, as-one,
in the same way that we now watch a film in a cinema.

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