On the edge of everything

Here we are now, on the edge of everything. It's hard to say how many of us there are, or how long we've been here. If you're looking for that sort of precision, for the mundane certainties you're used to wherever it is you've come from, you're going to be disappointed, I'm afraid. Everything distorts here - space, time, though, reason, feeling, memory. Cause and effect have a vague, unsteady relationship. And yet somehow, here we are, like refugees from the end of war, with nowhere else to go, pushed at last to the final frontier.

Sometimes I stand on the very edge and watch the veil shimmer in the endless night. It reminds me of the Aurora. I saw it once with my father, a long time ago in a different world, but the memory is difficult to place now. Sometimes it comes back with such force I have trouble telling whether I'm not a little boy again, standing in the snow, my eyes wide at the lights in the sky, breath misting in the air. There are times when I can make out a huge face in the veil, twisted in silent agony or ecstasy - hairless, androgynous, big as worlds. I can't tell if the others ever see it - some conversations in this place just seem to go nowhere, as if there are some subjects we aren't supposed to talk about, or can't grasp, and so our minds slip off them, slide away into something else. It was this I suppose as much as anything that fueled the great theological debates in the early days of our settlement here. That and the food. We eat every day, three meals, cooked and wholesome, but none of us knows where they come from or who prepares them. And so the question arose, naturally enough - is someone or something watching over us here? Perhaps the face I see in the veil is God's.

The big question used to be all anyone talked about here, or so it seemed. Whispers on bedrolls at night under the half-starred sky - the line like a knife cut where the edge comes, and there's no more of anything - prophesying old men with spittle-flecked beards standing in the light of the campfires, shouting themselves horse about judgement and sin and the rest. No one talks about it much anymore. Nothing was resolved, and the mind skids away into nonsense when you try and think about it, so there seems little point. Nothing here submits to investigation, and we have no tools with which to investigate. There is only us, and the edge, and sometimes it seems to me that there is no division, that we are the edge and we are its cause, and we play a game with ourselves by pretending not to know this.

To my knowledge, no one has died since we came here, but no one really knows how long ago that was, so it might mean nothing. I think some of us have left or disappeared. Perhaps they did die, but there were no bodies, no funeral rites or mourning, so it seems unlikely to me. There was a woman I used to know, though not well. She had auburn hair and green eyes, and a smile that made her seem sad and fragile and heartbreakingly beautiful. I was in love with her, I think, though we spoke little, and I would have liked to know her better, but she went away, and I never saw her again. I can't tell you if that was a week or ten years ago. Others arrive from time to time, like you, but, like you, they never seem to bring knowledge with them. Only questions.