2. Our Doppler effect

Still on the language issue - adding to it quite a perceptible concern for chronology - I want to tell you that at my birth, eons ago, nothing was said.

That made me, right from the start, a fictitious character in need of a magnetic message. A bit like one needs a compass or, better, a great number of space observatories to move around.

You see, there should have been somewhere something said loudly enough so to guarantee that I heard the entire cont(in)ent. A sequence of dense plasma particles engraved in a cosmic cultural context I could have identified with. Words with such luminosity properties that any physical displacement would have, with astonishing accuracy, predicted all those close encounters one needs to be wary of during a lifetime.

I came into this world full of hope for a language, one that would have been available exactly at the beginning of it all, filled with pulsing wavelengths, a celestial map which would have indicated what needed to be known – the movements and the exact positions of all large objects - in order for me to function properly in the years to come.

As I opened my ears for the first time, I expected a long, exhaustive sound carrying a solid, reliable meaning; a fundamental, essential explanatory sentence (it didn’t have to be long, just complete), spoken with clarity (I was a baby after all). Syllables well detached from one another forming eventually an introductory paragraph, with a thesis statement followed by supporting details keen to elucidate whatever questions might pop into the mind of a new being gifted with a spheroid head.

Yes, an algorithm.

I wanted a method for data collection.

And I was deprived of that. So I turned my back and left, in undefined wails of protest: If you must know, that’s the origin of the ‘malaise,’ my dear.

I was terribly stunned, you can well imagine, as the umbilical cord was cut, leaving me dependent upon my own much underdeveloped devices, unable to figure out the procedure to grow into a step-by-step person.

So, it didn’t happen, the growth, and that’s why I had to contend myself with an embryonic structure to build entire future universes.

This is who your Laolao is, my dear: Someone who has believed there was a glitch in the machine; who has thought all her life that it must still be out there, the message meant for her, its sound waves intertwined with all the useless speeches listened to, decades after decades of cataloguing astronomical amounts of systems; A diluted message, lost, weakening by the minute, but still carried through time, covered by voices that have psychiatric haloes like sensitive information one keeps for the sake of self-preservation.

In this cacophony, I spied. And spied. And spied. Stretching my auditory abilities as deep as they could go into the ancient memories of the world, in an intense search – I like to call it a stellar evolution - for a trace, a bleak whisper, whatever would be left of what I wish I had been told. Well in advance.

I never gave up trying to pinpoint this feeling powered by the ‘already-heard.’ I even came to accept that I had been the one, the fool, to misunderstand silence, mistaking it for absence.

A cloaked message, that’s what it must have been, did I sometimes convince myself, my remote sensors in untested overload mode.

It lasted a long time, this sad mindset, the same way radioactive materials tend to last. Isolated.

It made me carry around my personality a dangerous asteroid belt of well-studied, but destabilized words and phrases.

You can still, I’m sure, intersect with their remnants.

Fortunately, I’ve recently spiraled out of dark matter issues. Tidal patterns emitting mutually attractive atmospheres have put a final date, or fate, a deadline to my quest.

Happily, you came, lovely one, confusing all the tongues spoken around you in a clever effort of creative imitation. This has resulted in a new, mysterious language that can’t yet communicate anything as you are so young. And we get along just fine.

Antimatter purely coincidental to matter.

You have, my children and grandchildren, great philosophical implications, which will help examine the turbulent belief system my descendants have no wish to inherit from me.

You’ve changed my exposure to the heavy elements of this life and extracted from the event a unified theoretical model, a large-scale single open question capable of absorbing, digesting all in-falling clusters of molecules, tantrums and dizziness experience can exult.

A passage out, regardless of the viewing angles, in the advent of an expansion of our universe.

Light years of immense elastic tension becoming just that, a nice bandage for undiagnosed disorientation.

Therefore, as my spaceship crashes towards Earth, I might consider recognizing the right altitude where it’s sane to eject. Where it’s ok to trigger whatever’s still operational in the mental technologies deeply wired into each of our own personal zenith.

Or perhaps a sharp spark in my antenna will finally suggest a proper re-entry curve.

Be patient. I’m not crazy at all, simply an old lady who has revolved along her own axis a bit too much, always loyal to the vertiginous laws of mechanics. But they’ve just snapped these laws, at the approach of tiny errant atoms rearranging letters. Stowaways glowing among other fugitive space crews.

I hear you flashing your electron streams at my control panel. You want to rectify my trajectory. And galaxies twinkle by analogy. A reason today for wonderment. Plus for an awe-inspiring shift in pitch to confirm our Doppler effect.

Your Laolao