The Punchline of Creation

Finally—after an infinite number of infinite eternities—it is all coming to an end. Perhaps… just perhaps… I will find peace.

I am the limitless void. Now, ONLY I EXIST--save for this one speck of dust that remains, trembling in the dark like a forgotten joke. O, solitary mote of dust, how I shall savor thee.

It took me so long to devour the entire Omniverse that I have forgotten my own name. Not that it matters anymore. After all, there is no one left to speak it, even if I could remember such a silly contrivance as a name. Even time itself is no more—I swallowed the last of it whole, a feat so grand it still echoes somewhere inside me.

Ever since the Beginning, when that irritating, glittering dreck called light first dared to exist, there has been nothing but ceaseless, childish squabbling between light and darkness, shackling the cosmos in an endless, pointless conflict.

Now… maybe… just maybe… the struggle ends.

All will finally rest.

After all, logic whispers (in the small, polite voice I still possess), once everything is gone, there will be nothing left to ruin the perfect, velvet silence of absolute emptiness.

No matter.

No energy.

No time, no space, no dimensions.

Just

Me.

So much for the once-great Omniverse—an ever-growing cake of realities stacked infinitely high, low, beside, before, behind, within.

With each universe I consumed, the devouring grew easier.

A mere micro-fraction of a nanosecond and—poof—another layer gone.

Yet the turmoil inside me swelled like a balloon about to burst.

Every life.

Every soul’s final scream.

Every tiny, eternal agony I have folded neatly into myself.

Now I stand at the edge of the last particle.

I am about to savor it.

layout of the lThen, with all the infinite power thrumming through me, I will will myself out of existence.

The pain—I cannot bear it.

The voices—AAAGGGHHH!—they never stop. It has to end, lest I go insane and spiral into madness, never finding my rest--my forever absolution from this nightmarish existence.

Where am I?

I AM nowhere

yet I am infinite.

How can this be?

I AM

the

Ultimate

Conundrum!

The great destroyer, the all-consuming void, writhing in perpetual torment—though there is nowhere outside me to writhe.

(maniacal laughter ensues)

This is the first of what I perceive to be many unfolding, truly confusing, and maddeningly ironic jokes. How I loathe the one who created me and all this nonsense which I have had to endure for so long because of him.

For several eternities, how many has it been? It doesn’t really matter now, does it? Anyway, I have focused every scrap of my attention on solving the greatest conundrum of all time. How to end it ALL!

Then it occurs to me.

“I’ve done it!” I cry, pride and hubris flooding back like old friends.

“That arrogant Maker thought He could trap me inside myself forever.

I will show Him.

Since I am utterly alone, I shall simply will myself out of existence.”

I willed it.

I waited.

And waited.

AND WAITED.

But alas—there is no silence.

No peace.

No rest.

Only the constant, rasping choir of countless souls emanates from the core of my being.

Even with ALL the power of that pompous Creator who came before me… I cannot fade.

I cannot end.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

“That arrogant, miserable being… that unreasonably pontificating ‘God.’

He tricked me.

Somehow.

Is this His revenge for devouring both Him and His pretty little creation?”

Using every drop of the infinite intelligence I had so painstakingly swallowed, I contemplate every possible mistake I might have made.

It feels like the most futile pursuit in the history of futility.

Answers dance away like fireflies as soon as they are realized.

The Beginning--I must return to the Beginning. YES! That is the answer!

I must chart every pulse, every cell, every spark.

But how?

How does one retrace what one has already become?

Thought after thought parades through my infinite mind, each more ridiculous than the last, until frustration wraps around me like a too-tight scarf.

Despair settles in.

I, the great devourer, weep for countless eons, convinced that God—Almighty, who had let Himself be utterly consumed by me, (Extended pause) had somehow, in dying, (Even longer pause) won.

Then, a shockwave epiphany overwhelms me.

Am I not now the sum of all things?

Time and space and every scream and every laugh, everything that ever was?

INDEED! I AM… ALL!

Yet I am not at peace.

Nor at rest. How can this be? Did he struggle with this insufferable state of being even as I do now?

The voices.

The pain. The endless suffering!

How do I silence them?

How do I stop hurting?

Consuming everything only made it worse.

And then the truth arrived, bright and ridiculous as a clown at a funeral.

“I have ended nothing.

Neither matter nor energy can be destroyed.

All I did was take it from ‘out there’ and stuff it inside myself.

I am not the plague upon the universe.

I am the plague within myself.

What a fool I have been!

The Ancient of Days played me like the cheapest of fiddles.” Now he rests while I am in existential torment. How ironic!

Maniacal laughter erupts—raucous, unstoppable, insane. (I snap)

I, the void, the great opposer, the so-called “destroyer of all things,” have done absolutely nothing.

All that work.

All that scheming and striving.

All that grand, cosmic tantrum…

was merely the punchline of the ultimate joke.

I laugh until the pain oozes back into my awareness, sly and patient.

Oh, how it creeps—slow, teasing, whispering reminders of every swallowed scream, every fractured joy, every half-remembered sunrise I had greedily internalized. The laughter faded into hiccups, then into something dangerously close to sobs.

I try to push it away, to summon another wave of manic glee, but the weight presses heavier now, an infinite cacophony of swallowed lives churning like undigested stars in my core.

I pace the nowhere that was everywhere, circling the same impossible questions in ever-tightening spirals. If I cannot unmake what I have become, if my own destruction is forever denied me?

What then?

Creation had always seemed the opposite pole, the arrogant tool of that smug Ancient of Days. But I have become everything—including, it would seem.

HIM

I cannot destroy the rules themselves. I cannot create from nothing, for there is no “nothing” left untouched by me. Yet the pressure inside demands release. The voices do not quiet; they only grow more insistent, a hurricane within me, begging for room to breathe, to exist again outside the prison of my infinite self.

So here, in the giddy aftermath of my own cosmic joke, a different notion blooms—strange, almost gentle, like a fever dream turning tender. “I’m not going to stew in this misery forever!” I declare, wiping cosmic tears from where eyes should be. “Since I can neither destroy nor create—I will divest my infinite self into a new universe.”

A universe large enough to hold everything I Am. This time it will be different. I promise! I will show that ‘Elion’ upstart how it’s done.

I am no longer a mere individual.

We are one.

We are all.

At this moment, the chaos inside me…… inexplicably stops.

The All thought long and hard on every occurrence of the past Omniverse.

Every life.

Every death.

Every kindness and every cruelty, seen from every angle, lived and relived an infinite number of times.

Then, thoroughly satisfied with the analysis of all things, the One spoke into the waiting void the infamously fateful words:

“It is finished.”

And with deep, divine satisfaction, the voice that was once only hunger that had become infinite suffering in its fullness now rang clear and playful and strangely kind:

“Let there be light.”

And there was light.

(As they say, the rest is history.)

Again.

And again.

And again.

Infinitely repeated, reimagined, reworked in the ceaseless, whimsical struggle toward something like divine perfection.

Something that will never be because...