prompt: mess / title: variations on a theme in misc. flash fiction

On the eighth day, God rested again. And on the ninth and the tenth and the thirtieth day and the three hundredth, God continued to rest. Finally, one morning God said ‘we’ll call this Boredom!’ and so it was. You may believe boredom a terrible fate, but this is God we’re talking about. God saw things differently and, anyway, boredom had just been invented, it was something new even for God. God relished in the wonderfully-novel feeling of “boredom” for such a number of days that only God Itself could keep count. God can’t lose count. It’s one of the problems being God.

On a day with a number only God knew, God said ‘what’s this new feeling now?’ and instead of boredom It felt a deep emptiness, felt like nothing could understand It or bring at any meaning or any sense of peace. God said “I’ll call this Loneliness!” and lingered in that new emotion as well. Unlike boredom, however, God couldn’t linger on feeling loneliness for thousands or millions of days. By Day Four of loneliness, it stopped feeling fresh or exciting, it just felt awful. Even God can only take so much loneliness, God decided it was the worst feeling anything could ever feel!

God tried busying Itself making more planets. More species. More concepts. Places where the laws of physics were inverted, where time flowed sideways, where the stars blew bubbles and the oceans laughed at God’s jokes. But God’s loneliness persisted for incalculable eons.

Now, in a certain sense, God is the universe and this universe in totality is God. And in a much more practical sense, the universe’s infinite. The only thing that could even hope to staunch the loneliness of an infinite God would be for It to take up studying its infinite self.

And then God remembered, oh yes, people. There were gonna be billions of us eventually, each living different lives with different challenges and different advantages. Far more than likely we were going to make a real mess of things, but maybe that was the solution to all God’s problems.

What better way to engage with Its own eternal unknowability than as billions and billions of little shards of itself, blinded to their true purposes so that the experiment was never ruined by preconceived notions of what an outcome need be. There were too many contradictory lessons for God to learn, It couldn’t remain just one thing to learn it all or even get close to knowledge.

So, God went down to Earth, to the Garden where the two humans had been living agelessly and innocently and turned Itself into a tree whose fruit contained the totality of God’s consciousness. Those two would eat that fruit and be infected with blinded fragments of divinity, to explore this infinity in ten trillion different ways, in life and death, joy and pain, until everything was known. For the first time, God would no longer be alone. And God said… that was good.