"The Arrival"

"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." –Carl Sagan

"There's no use in worrying about it."

    But if there was one thing Claire Barnes was any good at, it was worrying. How many times had she heard those words, and each and every time it never changed the fact that she still found herself caught in a chaotic mess within her own head? How many times had she read the articles, watched the videos and obsessed over the facts, and still found herself struggling in order to comprehend everything. How many times had she asked herself why, expecting to receive an answer, like a tiny voice in her head, yet she was only met with silence and an odd sense of foreboding within her chest?

If this way supposed to happen, if there was no need to worry about it, then why did she still feel so sad? Why, of all times, did it have to be now?

"Stop it. You're going to make yourself sick."

    Claire turned her attention away from the view outside the passenger window, casting a bitter glance towards her companion. He was a long time friend of hers, though she couldn't remember exactly when or how it occurred; it had always just seemed like he was there from the beginning.

"Then why are we all converging like a pack of animals if there's nothing to worry about?"

    She might have been a little harsh, maybe even a little unfair. After all, it wasn't Kai's fault, or anyone else's for that matter. But for lack of a better person, other than herself, she found herself quick to put the blame on Kai only because she knew he understood, and wouldn't hold it against her. She was extremely selfish; she knew that. But right now, right there, she felt too desperate. Like she were drowning and clinging to one breath of air, and she could find no other way to feed her starving lungs other than to release some pent up chaos within her.

Kai only grabbed her hand from its spot in her lap, holding tight as they drove towards the center of town, and she found herself having to look away. She was selfish.

  * * *

  If Claire had been expecting some sort of chaos, she would have been sorely disappointed. In reality, it was exactly as she anticipated. From far away she could see the mass of bodies, coerced into one giant circle, though each individual left enough space for another, so as not to cause crowding. Each sidewalk was filled, though the buildings lay empty with the help of a quick glance at the windows. The noise level was kept to a hum, like the static she sometimes suffered through when the cable went out and the television stared back in a static of white. Cars were parked neatly, not sporadically, like she might have expected when needing great haste. It was all so organized, so sane. She soon found herself trembling, an anger twisting her stomach until she felt as if she might throw up.

She turned towards Kai as they stopped at the edge of the crowd, her throat tight as she forced a yell down her throat.

"This isn't right, Kai. I don't care what they say or how they prove it. This is wrong."

    He simply stared straight ahead, the color of his eyes changing; a myriad of colors churning within the iris while the pupil dilated, as if accommodating to its new appearance. It was a slow process, one that usually caused an itch behind the eyelid, like one might feel when a piece of debris somehow made itself inside. A year ago this would have been considered odd; terrifying even. Now, well…now they knew.

* * *

    It had started not long after her twelfth birthday; two months to be exact. If Claire thought hard enough, she could vaguely recall that it had been a Thursday, and if she really put herself out there and almost physically pulled that memory from the deep recesses of her brain, as if she were grabbing a minuscule pebble from the bottom of a box filled with stones, she could remember that when it had happened, she had been sleeping.

    She had been one of the fortunate ones; safe inside her house, protected by four pink walls, a layer of sheets and mounds of pillows. She hadn't been in a car, or a plane, or even in a store on one of the busier streets. She hadn't been crushed when a semi came careening towards her, or trampled when a car came crashing through a store window while the guy behind the wheel smashed his skull into the window shield. She hadn't even tripped down the stairs in mid-step and snapped her neck.

    She had been asleep as her mother fell down the stairs while in a search for a glass of water. She had been asleep when her brother lost control of the wheel and killed both himself as well as two women eating out in a restaurant. She had been asleep while masses of people died, one after another. And it wasn't until morning that she had found the chaos left for her. It wasn't until morning that she found her mother and went to Kai's house in a panicked haze. It wasn't until morning that they found out no one could come and take her mom away, or that around the world, the same thing had occurred, all within the span of five minutes.

    It had been months before anyone had been able to come up with a semi-acceptable answer. Months of testing, investigating and talking of that one night. In the end they gave it a name; Mass Exodus, for lack of better understanding. It was said to have been a sort of collective reset of the conscious mind. All at once, everyone around the world had experienced the same phenomenon; a feeling of faintness and then nothing. Five minutes later and the ones who were lucky enough to survive were left with a gap in their memory. The farthest record of recollection before the Mass Exodus was two hours before it had occurred. And then anything else before that time within a week had been wiped clean. The most someone had lost was two years.

    But it all had seemed like a precursor to what would actually happen a few months later, as if it was all meant to create a clean slate for the amount of madness to ensue. For Claire, things were settling down as much as they could, though she still felt an emptiness within herself which hungered each and every minute for something; anything. Her family was gone; there was no fixing that. And her identity; she felt as if a bit of it had been stolen from her, accosted from the middle of the night, leaving her with a big, blank space. And then came the Arrival. First it had started off as something along the lines of déjà vu. Little things like having walked into a store she was almost sure she hadn't been before, and yet knew exactly where to find the box of cookies on sale for two dollars and ninety-nine cents, or seeing someone's face for the first time, yet knowing sometime, somewhere, she met them once. And then, well… then everything went to hell.

    There was a theory before the Mass Exodus that, quite basically, humans themselves were just one, unified consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. That, considering the fact that, scientifically speaking, each and every individual being was made up of the stuff one could easily find within the cosmos, people were just one stream of thought created for the simple purpose of the universe understanding itself. Before, one had easily thought the individual self was just that; individual. Some even went as far to argue that any reality outside one's own mind was unsure, deeming it the only consciousness, and all other consciousness' being the product of their own perception.

    Either way, Claire had found it too confusing to wrap her mind around. Even now, five years later, after having experienced thought and memory beyond her control and experience, she couldn't quite give into to the possibility that, yes, she was just one small part of something that was said to expand indefinitely and create black holes that consumed itself. That, yes, the universe had become its own subjective being, and she were only a product of itself, drifting around and wondering why.

But if there was one thing she knew to be certain it was that, honestly, no one belonged to themselves anymore.