The Zygote's Dream

Bulut was not yet a pulse. He carried no name yet, no shape, no direction. He was only a tremor in a lightless silence, in a void where time had not yet stood upright and meaning had not yet been born. He could not be called “being”; but neither was he quite absence. What was he, then? Perhaps a whisper in which the universe folded in on itself for the first time, perhaps a spark of thought inside the endless dark.

He was thinking of that state now: the zygote… As it underwent its cell divisions, the universe divided with it, multiplied, broke apart, came together. Each chromosome settled inside him like a star. It was as if he were floating not in his mother's body but among galaxies. Each molecule was the rhythm of a planet. And every rhythm was weaving the silence that would one day turn into his thought.

When Bulut rewound to this point in the deepest folds of his brain, he realised that existence had never been so naked. Because here nothing had yet been learned; there was no language, no pain, no past. Yet the potential of all of it had wrapped around him like an invisible membrane. Even as a zygote he was a labyrinth growing towards himself. With every cell division a character branched, a draft of fate copied itself.

Thinking of himself as he was before birth, he felt as though he were touching the trunk of a tree. That trunk was full of the knowledge that came from its own roots. Even as a zygote he was not alone; for every gene he carried was the echo of hundreds of years. A human being listens to the song of the universe not only from the moment of birth, but from the moment it begins to form. And Bulut could hear it now.
“I was not chosen,” he thought to himself, “I called myself.”
For some beings are called into the world, while others make their own call heard and knit their existence stitch by stitch. Bulut knew now: he was of the second kind.

The more he thought of that state, the more he grasped that the body was only a garment. Even as a zygote the pattern of this garment had been prepared; but the content, the essence, was born from somewhere far deeper. Perhaps from stardust, perhaps from the voice of an ancient river, perhaps from the vibration of a prayer never spoken…
This play of being that had begun as a zygote had now become a language he played with consciously. Where once he had believed the outer world was shaping him, he now saw that the outer world had merely held a mirror to his inner reflections. His surroundings were only an echo chamber — whatever voice he whispered within, the outside echoed back.
At the end of this inner journey Bulut met with a truth:
Being was not simply to be; being was to give direction. That tiny cell would one day become a walking man, then a thinking man, then a man who simply “is”… And perhaps all these stages were a dream turning and turning within itself in an endless cycle. The zygote's dream.

He lit a candle that night. As the flame threw shadows on the walls of the room, it was as if he were watching the division of his first cell all over again. Each shadow gave birth to another of his states. In one his childhood was crying, in one his youth was running, in one his old age was silent. But at the centre of them all there was a membrane turning silently: the zygote.

Now he knew. The secret of being did not lie in becoming something. Everything had already become. The point was to see again that purest seed within, and to charge it with the meaning of life. For true transformation began not by being born, but by rebuilding one's own birth. And perhaps that was why he now built his life not towards his past, but towards his first state, the state that had not yet come to be. Waking each morning, he behaved as if he were being born anew. Each of his thoughts was a cell. Each choice, a new division. And each of his silences, the stillness in the womb of the universe.