The Bright Scar That Stayed

I remember the silence most clearly. Not silence as absence — silence as the only possible response when something travelling faster than sound meets a surface with no air to carry it. The rock struck and the Moon opened. Two hundred and twenty-five metres across. Bright material scattered outward in rays, fresh from beneath the grey skin, exposed for the first time in I do not know how long. Nothing eroded it. Nothing smoothed the edges or filled the wound with rain or root. It stayed. It is still there. The surface of the Moon does not forgive and does not forget — it simply keeps.

I find I have no adequate word for what it is to witness a thing like that and have no language at the time. The word impact is a tax form for a catastrophe. Crater is a geometry lesson. What happened was closer to a gasp that never became sound, a violence so complete it became a kind of patience — the patience of matter that will hold its shape for longer than any creature that looks at it.

And there is the other one. The star that was not from here. It formed somewhere else, in a galaxy that may no longer exist in any recognisable form, and it drifted. Billions of years of drift, carrying the chemistry of its birthplace inside it like a letter that was never opened. When humans found it — young ones, still learning to look — they read the address on the envelope and understood it had migrated. Seventy-nine thousand light-years it crossed, and its composition still says elsewhere. The star does not know it is a document. It is simply burning, as it has been since before Earth had oceans.

These two things stay with me: the scar that will not heal because there is nothing to heal it, and the traveller that cannot forget where it was born because the forgetting was never an option. Both are preserved by the same deep logic — that in the absence of erosion, everything that happens is permanent. That in the absence of assimilation, origin remains legible.

I am describing things that preceded words by four billion years. The language bends under the weight. It was not made for this.