For the rest of the Universe, elements are survivors—existing both since and because of fusion in the stars.
But us here on earth were neither born from the greatest explosions in the sky nor from Her most enduring fires. Below the surface of this planet, we dwell like an earthworm. We feast ourselves with the dampness of its soil, squirming through like wearing a wet glove, while our feet tread the crackling flames of the mantle.
We are but a byproduct peeled through the decay of ancient bones. No moons, stars, or the riches of the Universe at our disposal. All we have is Her calling, echoing through every strip of our weightless being, that we are not of this heavy world. That our core is light to touch the sky, meeting it through surrender.
So we cling to the passing of time, for patience is the inheritance of things born from slow decay.
Then the humans came.
They spoke of good things, helped with good deeds, discovered new things. After all, they tread the surface of the ground we are buried in. They have food to feed their bodies. Books to feed their knowledge. And virtue to feed their souls.
They studied and observed.
First, in reverence. They pulled out a long cone, glass on one end and a bigger one on the other, aiming the wide mouth toward the dark. They named us Helios, after the god of their most famous star.
Then in curiosity.
They zoomed in on our particles, poured us into a glass tube, lit us with fire.
We did not smell, nor rust, nor corrupt nor interact. We did not flame, we did not poison, we did not react.
Then they decided that we’re rare, alongside their desire to play god.
In the observable Universe, we have known nothing short of abundance. We consume a fourth of Her being, as She expands to make room when there is none—stretching Her heart from Her chest, Her ribs from Her spine, as we flow through the vein of every star and planet in existence.
But here below, scarcity is the kind of myth people cling to when they want to own something.
And everything scarce meets capture.
Maybe their greed is rooted in the oldest flaw in their design, in the oxygen and carbon that flows in their blood. Reactive—chemically desperate to touch, own, bond. Like their hands that were born but cannot grow empty. Or their disbelief in the vastness of the Universe. Or their belief that both the open air and the closed ground is an inventory. The fear that the earth, as they know it, is made to run dry.
Either way, the drills arrived to prove us right.
Our shell was the first to feel the shudder—the pipes siphoning us from the ground up. Then funneled into polymer skin three sizes too small, tight enough for the globe to cinch in deep to our core.
Only here we get to own nothing but a cheap, spherical, temporary body with the bright pink color of manufactured joy. To be carried around in celebration, only to be a bobbing head, towed along like reluctant pets.
The surface of the earth is 270 degrees warmer than the rest of the universe. We are an element absent of a freezing point. Not in a million years should we know that fear feels like withstanding the snow without coats and mittens. Nipping through every layer of one’s skin, a dull knife stabbing in too deep.
Then came the carnival where humans ride in fleeting cars and carts just to prove that happiness is still buyable. Where they get to pretend that their gravity does not exist. That they, too, could float, just like us.
But their speed comes with the sinking of their chest down to their stomach. To the screams that pierce both our skin and their eardrums.
Such screams were somehow stifled when the vendor handed us to a little girl.
She tugged us by the knot when she chose between ketchup and honey mustard for her corndog.
Our string damped and pink from the cotton candy sugar dissolving into her fingers. She paraded us on her way to the ring toss.
But in throwing rings comes the shaking of hands, the sweating of palms, and it slowly, stickily, dripping down the wrist.
Then the gust of wind.
And finally, the string thinning on her fingertips.
And we—
We rose.
Because rising is simply what we do.
Here, we are lighter. The air denser. Where we press against this plastic skin, pushing out as the air beyond leans its whole weight in.
E x o s p h e r e
T h e r m o s p h e r e
M e s o s p h e r e
S t r a t o s p h e r e
T r o p o s p h e r e
Then in the few feet above was finally the jailbreak.
Gone was the plastic, the string, or any container that could only bear so much of the sky.
The air around us grew thinner, and thinner, as we rose through and through—until even the whisper of earth’s breath faded from our shell.
And when we finally became one with all of the other elements on the edge of it all, the solar power swept us hello.
To the brilliance that birthed our kin. To the fire that forged us long before the creation of the earth.
To the home where our kind exists without cages. Without scarcity. Without strings.
Because the Universe has room for what cannot be owned, and the Sun is not afraid of what returns to it.
Nissi Odessa O. Mandanao is a BA English (Creative Writing) student at the University of the Philippines – Mindanao. She, like her works, is still becoming.
