{"id":270,"date":"2026-04-21T23:07:56","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T23:07:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/?page_id=270"},"modified":"2026-04-21T23:22:26","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T23:22:26","slug":"a-loving-universe","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/fiction\/a-loving-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"A Loving Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amber Arquilla<\/span><\/p>\n

She is walking across the shores, barefoot and smiling. Her hair is smooth, long brown strands tossing across her shoulders and rising up with my winds. She walks close to my shores, stepping on wet, compacted sand, letting the traces of my waves lap at her feet. She smiles, gazing at my horizon, my sun, my stars. I wish I could smile back.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She has been walking my shores, my forests, my mountains, for so long now. Millennia upon millennia, both of us watching the rivers of civilization run their course. First, came man, with their primitive and destructive technologies. Man hurt me, and I hurt them. Then, came their creations, the metal ones. They were kinder to me, but separate. The nerves of my roots could not breach through their metal skin, no matter how often I longed for their touch. Finally, man came again, but different. Unnatural, even for them, disconnected by their surgeons and scalpals, they were no longer of me. But she still was. She still lives, all these millennia later, a woman, frozen in her youth walking my shores and trekking my mountains. She\u2019s seen so much of me, the beautiful sights in those lazy days, the closed-off and tight caves where she stayed safe, the wide-sweeping and vibrant coral reefs she explored, and the ripe orchards she harvested. Yet here, right here is my favorite view:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She\u2019s wearing a sundress, plain and white, sewn by her own hands. She lets her hair whip in my winds, unbound from the plain golden circlet she usually held it in. Her bare, soft feet sink into my sand. They feel tired, calloused.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She has that same wistful grin across her face, looking at a lover you\u2019ll never know. I feel guilty when I see that face. She is lonely, nobody to hug, to hold, to love in the way her kind always had. All she has\u2026is me.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always loved her sundresses.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I walk across the shores, barefoot and grinning at her golden and painted eye. It\u2019s beautiful, up there in the sky, setting \u2018round the horizon. How long has it been since I called that the sun? It\u2019s funny, it\u2019s been her eye, her gaze, for so, so long. I can\u2019t even remember the last time I thought of it as anything different, anything beside the warm light of a lover\u2019s eyes. I wonder how many she\u2019s had, in her infinite life? How many wanderers, across her warm and frigid earth, walking for their short centuries, trying to feel all of her stone, hold all her creatures, yet ultimately unable too. I wonder how many saw her other hands, her other bodies, her other eyes. So many forms of her, across this vast and nascent universe.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The first, of course, was the body I live upon. The body of small mountains and deep oceans, of green shrubbery and pale deserts. This has always, will always be my favorite version of her. I can\u2019t quite explain why, maybe it\u2019s nostalgia, or mortal affection. Maybe I\u2019ve always appreciated the dulcet tones, over the burning reds and glowing greens. I\u2019ve seen thousands of them, thousands of planets that spun around even more stars. I\u2019ve seen worlds of magma, an ever-growing furnace that did nothing but burn and cool with the seasons of time, centered around cores of azure diamond. I\u2019ve seen worlds of energy, surfaces of forever-reacting uranium, their reactions bordering on the power of stars, cores of boron stabilizating them, keeping them from achieving the height of glowing elegance. I\u2019ve seen worlds of death, with winds of razor-sharp glass and surfaces of carved obsidian. Yet among everything I\u2019ve seen, I cannot help but love the first above them. The first, and\u2026something else. A place that cannot be called a planet, nor a star. It was so, so much more.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a couple centuries, I\u2019m not sure how many, since I last looked into her true eye. I don\u2019t think I could forget it, no matter how long I lived. At first, there was only darkness around her gaze, gravity wrapping and warping an aura of light, outlining the circle of your iris. As I fell inwards, it should have changed me, twisted me, torn me limb from limb. But it didn\u2019t. It couldn\u2019t. It was you, after all, and you would never hurt me. You held me, in your gravitational pull, thousands upon thousands of hands that held every one of my atoms like they were the most delicate of petals. I fell into you for\u2026i can\u2019t quite say how long. Maybe it was minutes. Maybe it was decades. Who am I, to measure the pass of your time, the clock-ticks of your universe? Who was I, back then, to see the beauty of your true gaze, when I finally reached its center? The eye that shone like a supernova, nerves made of stardust, centered around an impossiblity. A hole in the middle of the world. Yet it was not a hole, it was another place. And yet\u2026it was a hole, a hole and a place simultaneously, a fractal of two things in one, like a staircase that goes nowhere, a road that goes everywhere. It was an overflowing canvas, colors so bright, yet mixing together until they meld into a miasma of grayish-brown nothingness. And it was blank. A void, removed of any substance, any color, even white. But, above everything else, all the colors and voids and space and time, it was\u2026lonely. Tired. I reached out, to touch it, to touch you\u2026\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And I was home again, home in that little mud-speckled cave, laying on a hand-sewn rug, leaning against your rocky, plant-coated body. I felt your moss unwrap me, opening the arms of your embrace.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even today, I can\u2019t quite grasp what happened, when I touched you. I\u2019ve tried to remember a thousand times, and yet it seems just out of my reach, leaving me with nothing but blinks of motion, heat, energy. There was one image, I can recall. It is\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

flashing and blurry, like I was not meant to see it. It\u2019s of a pitch-black silhouette, ringed in golden light, in the shape of a beautiful woman.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help but wonder what that body feels like. I\u2026I wish I could hold it, like you hold me. Wrap my arms around your body and squeeze, make sure you feel my presence like I feel yours. But I can\u2019t, not really. It\u2019d be like an ant trying to hug a giant, all you\u2019ll ever feel is the slightest tingle of a touch. You\u2019ll never feel any love, any affection, no matter how much you give away. I\u2026don\u2019t know how to live with that.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I guess I\u2019ll live anyway.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amber Arquilla She is walking across the shores, barefoot and smiling. Her hair is smooth, long brown strands tossing across her shoulders and rising up with my winds. She walks close to my shores, stepping on wet, compacted sand, letting the traces of my waves lap at her feet. She smiles, gazing at my horizon,… <\/p>\n

Read more A Loving Universe<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81,"featured_media":0,"parent":17,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-270","page","type-page","status-publish","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/81"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":271,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/270\/revisions\/271"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/17"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/21-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}