The Universe is a Backdrop
The moonlight bleeds into the world of shadows. It’s quiet here and the far away stars and the nearest planets are hovering above. They look so small. Like shining specks of dust transfixed in the night sky, which at times, are almost insignificant to the beholder’s eye. And yet, in reality, they outsize every building, every skyscraper, every structure that has ever been built on this sacred land.
And do you see those monuments and artificial lights on the ground? They serve as signs of habitation. The cities and towns here are built like mazes, purposefully made to be inescapable. The inhabitants lead strange lives within these made-up symmetrical boundaries. Unlike their ancestors, their lives extend beyond the notions of survival and instinct. But as with all things, this freedom, too, comes at a cost.
In this labyrinth, some manage to climb the tallest of peaks on their way, while others spend their entire lives finding and crafting their own paths to destinations they’ll never find. Some are miserable even after achieving everything they ever dreamed of, while others have found happiness in merely enacting the role of Sisyphus — striving towards destinations they’ll never reach.
Their existence is both meaningless and pitiful, poetic and beautiful. Perspective, as they say, is everything. Just like how their home is a small world from the outside. Smaller than a speck of dust in the face of a billion stars and their own worlds. On its own, it’s dead and lifeless, like any other lump of rock floating in space. But from here, the universe is a backdrop, and the land is home to billions and billions of lives—each with an endless sea full of emotions, experiences and breathtaking dreams; each more meaningful to one another than anything else that this world has ever seen.
