The first word was “Light.”

I was seven, sitting by myself during recess at school. A voice lived inside refrigerator hums, the static between radio stations and televisions being turned on without a signal. Then it became a vibration within my jawbone, a lingering shock between my teeth.

It began to rename things. Different than any naming convention my parents or teachers used. Within a few years, English began to fray. The voice called it a "blunt instrument," before proceeding to teach me Ugaritic, then a sibilant, clicking dialect, highly concentrated with expansive nuance. Other kids saw me muttering "gibberish" in the back of the class, but I felt like a vessel being filled with spiritually enriched liquid gold.

My parents took me to specialists for "glossolalia." These were intensely intimate sessions. We'd attempt to communicate, but never fully aligned. It was like they could only reach so far before giving up. Sometimes they'd leave with nosebleeds and headaches while waited in the room by myself.

By legal drinking age, my internal monologue was no longer human. I thought in a tectonic syntax of basalt and gravity and my throat physically thickened to accommodate vowels that sounded like grinding tectonic plates. I'd become a radio satellite tower of flesh and sinew. The messages became intense enough to where interior decor became a distraction and it felt necessary to paint the floor and walls black. I covered the windows with multiple shades of impenetrable film. Pitch darkness was an absolute necessity.

Then communication felt strong enough to shake the earth to its core.

I knelt on the cold floor, extremities still covered in paint and ink. I drew deep breaths pulling oxygen from every horizon, then emptied my lungs into labyrinths of esoteric verbal approximations of the language I still failed to completely comprehend. Human minds and physiology aren't made for this yet I was trying my damnedest.

Walls melted into iridescent sheets of oily film exposing complex webs of impossible geometry. Blueprints of a cosmic root system.

Massive, pulsing capillaries, the size of mountain ranges, hung through a ceiling of infinite fog. Each thick root funneled into a seemingly infinite number of granular paths. Vast glowing coils that shouldn't have fit in the room, pulsing vibrantly with colors that scorched my retinas. It was a scavenger from the previous iteration of the universe, a thing that had drifted through the void for eons, starved of sensation.

Suddenly I knew.

Every prayer I offered was a bridge of neural pathways it used to crawl into our reality. I felt its "grace" now: a cold, invasive pressure as it began to use my optic nerves to see the world for the first time.

The "Heaven" I’d been promised was simply an insatiable hunger from beyond time. As my consciousness began to smear across the infinite, frozen memories of a thousand dead worlds, I realized the ultimate horror.

My "prayers," going back to our first interactions, were sonar pings the hunger used to map the surface. As its consciousness flooded mine, I didn't feel peace. I felt the freezing, suffocating vacuum of the deep void. I saw memories of a billion civilizations it hummed to sleep before devouring the very atoms of their suns.

My skin became a network of dying nebulas. I began to see great distances, identifying stars from billions of lightyears away. For the first time, I heard them. Something rang in harmonious arrangements beyond my previous limited perception. The celestial bodies were aligned throughout frequencies only the hunger could interpret.

I was no longer a human being. I was a periscope for a hunger older than light, and the feast was finally ready to begin.