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Story by: Sergey Veretennikov.
Pavel returned home as usual.
As thousands of men return home after thousands of identical days.
The elevator shuddered slightly as it passed the floors; the entrance hall smelled of dust, other people’s dinners, and something elusive and old, as though the building itself had long grown tired of human footsteps, voices, and expectations.
The key turned habitually in the lock. The door opened. He was greeted by the apartment’s familiar silence, where everything was always in its place, as though life itself had long since learned this simple order and no longer wanted to change anything.
Behind the wall, the neighbors were arguing again. Dully, irritably, as though they were throwing not words at one another, but their last reserves of strength. Upstairs, a girl was playing the violin. She still could not keep the sound steady, and so the melody trembled constantly, faltered, then gathered itself again, like a fledgling trying to take flight for the first time...
An ordinary evening. An ordinary building. An ordinary neighborhood, where the windows of high-rises lit up one after another, like hundreds of little cells in which people kept their weariness, habits, kettles, slippers, grievances, televisions, and rare moments of tenderness.
Pavel took off his jacket.
Placed his shoes on the mat.
Went into the kitchen and poured himself some water.
Stood by the window for a while.
Someone was smoking by the entrance. Someone was walking a dog. Blue television light flickered in one window. In another, a woman was watering flowers. Everything was so familiar that it almost did not exist. When the world repeats itself for too long, it ceases to be noticed.
Pavel sat in the armchair.
That very armchair, which over the years had taken on the shape of his body, as though it too had become part of his destiny.
He put on his headphones.
Pressed the button...
And at first, nothing unusual happened.
Only sound.
Quiet. Deep. Almost invisible.
It was not a melody in the usual sense. More like the breathing of something immense. As though somewhere far away, beyond the limits of hearing, space itself were breathing. And that breath slowly, very slowly, entered him.
Pavel closed his eyes.
The neighbors were still arguing behind the wall.
The violin upstairs was still trembling.
Somewhere below, the entrance door slammed...
But all of it began to recede, as though someone were carrying away the sounds of the world one by one, like lights being extinguished in a long corridor.
He did not fall asleep.
No.
This was not like sleep.
Rather, he began to sink not downward, but in all directions at once.
Inward.
And outward.
As though a space had suddenly opened inside him that had always been there, but had remained silent. As though behind the familiar man who went to work, paid bills, greeted neighbors, and bought bread, there stood another—vast, ancient, nameless. One who had been waiting for his arrival. Like an ancient guardian. Like an eternal friend. Like his second self...
First, he saw the stars.
Not as points in a black sky.
But as living bonfires of Being.
They were born in the abyss, drifted through the great silence, gathered worlds around themselves, faded, fell apart, and flared up again in other reaches of eternity. Rivers of light flowed between them.
The spirals of galaxies slowly unfurled like flowers growing not in soil, but in mystery. Nebulae resembled the breath of God, if breath could have a color.
Then he saw the ages.
They did not follow one another like pages in a book. They existed all at once. All of them. As though time were not a road, but an ocean, and each age merely a separate wave upon its surface. He saw cities that did not yet exist. He saw temples of which not even dust remained. He saw people whose names had been forgotten, and people who had yet to be born. He saw wars, prayers, kisses, the birth of children, funeral pyres, discoveries, betrayals, revelations, songs by the fire, spaceships, ancient deserts, icy worlds, forests on other planets, beings who were not human and yet looked up at the sky with the same question.
Who am I?
The question did not sound in words.
It was a call of the soul...
Pavel saw Earth.
At first, as a sphere of light in the immeasurable night.
Then farther away.
Farther still.
Until it became a barely visible blue point.
Then it disappeared completely.
And then he saw himself.
Not Pavel in the armchair.
Not the man in the fifth-floor apartment in the building by the road.
But a tiny speck of consciousness in the boundlessness, so small that the very thought of his own importance seemed ridiculous. Everything he had considered his own—his worries, biography, name, fears, plans, weariness—all of it was smaller than a grain of sand lost in the wind between worlds.
For a moment, he was frightened by boundless freedom!
And at the same time—by his own insignificance in this infinity.
But soon he trusted the Force that could not be seen.
But that was near.
As though a drop had suddenly realized that the ocean was reflected within it.
As though a spark had remembered that its nature was fire.
He saw that everything was connected.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
A thread existed between his heart and a distant star.
An invisible connection existed between someone’s tear in another country and the birth of a new galaxy.
Between the girl with the violin upstairs, the neighbors arguing behind the wall, his tired hands, cosmic dust, ancient priests, future worlds, the silence of black spaces, and the thought now being born within him—threads existed everywhere. Invisible, radiant, alive.
- Who am I?
He thought again.
- God?
- The Cosmos?
- The Higher Mind?
The answers came and immediately dissolved.
He was too small to call himself God.
And too infinite to be merely Pavel.
He was not the entire Cosmos, but the Cosmos was within him.
He was not the Higher Mind, but the mind that created the stars somehow looked at the world through his eyes.
He was a wave—but the whole nature of the sea was within the wave.
He was a note—but the whole symphony sounded within it.
He was a point—but boundlessness was hidden within that point.
And the more insistently he tried to answer, the clearer it became: the true answer could not be spoken. Words were too narrow for it. They were good for apartments, schedules, agreements, explanations, but not for the abyss in which the soul suddenly finds itself.
He was lost.
But not as one becomes lost in a forest or an unfamiliar city.
He was lost in magnificence.
In light.
In the impossibility of separating himself from everything.
And perhaps that was precisely the first true beginning of his answer.
When everything known disappears, truth begins to emerge.
When you can no longer say, “I am only this,”—then you have a chance to see what you truly are.
The music continued to play.
And Pavel felt as though he were flying through layers of reality, as through transparent veils. Somewhere there were worlds where beings communicated through light. Somewhere there were civilizations that had long since left behind coarse matter and become something like thinking energies. Somewhere there were dimensions where form was unnecessary, and everything existed as pure knowledge, as love, as vibration. And none of this was alien. Somehow, all of it felt familiar. As though he were not traveling there, but remembering.
Remembering what he had once known.
Before birth.
Before his name.
Before the first pain.
Before the first “I know.”
And then, at some elusive moment, he saw something else as well.
That all this infinity did not negate the ordinary little world in which he existed.
Precisely because time was infinite, one ordinary evening mattered.
One building.
One apartment on the fifth floor.
One violin upstairs.
One argument behind the wall.
One tired man in an armchair...
Because Eternity loves to reveal itself in the small.
Infinity is not somewhere far away. It knows how to enter the simplest things, as light enters an ordinary window.
When Pavel opened his eyes, the room was the same.
The same evening.
The same apartment.
Behind the wall, they were still speaking loudly and angrily, but more quietly now, as though realizing it was pointless.
Upstairs, the girl was still drawing the bow across the strings, and suddenly one note came out so pure that Pavel froze.
In the kitchen, a glass stood with water left unfinished. Outside, the streetlights were still glowing.
Nothing had changed.
And everything had changed.
He sat silently, without moving, like a man who had returned not from a flight of fancy, but from a very distant home.
He did not want to explain or prove anything.
Because some experiences are like stardust on the palm of your hand: if you begin examining it too roughly, it disappears.
He only looked at his hands.
Ordinary human hands.
But now there was something else in them.
As though they belonged not only to him, but also to the eternal being he had just been.
Pavel took off his headphones.
Sat for a little longer.
And suddenly almost smiled.
Very faintly.
Almost imperceptibly.
Because perhaps the answer was not in knowing whether he was God, the Cosmos, or the Higher Mind.
But in simply feeling, one day:
I am not separate.
I am not lost.
I am part of such a great Mystery that even my ordinary life becomes extraordinarily great.
And outside the window stood the same ordinary evening...
Author: Sergey Veretennikov.
— “Because Eternity loves to reveal itself in the small”!
