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You are stretched. For once your body (body?) feels comfortable, not twisted or butchered or crammed into a place too small for it. You are solid; you are something, and this is new to you.
In your oldest memories, you are a spark, existing in a realm beyond realms, somewhere you thought (others of your kind thought) that you could touch the planes of the things that were alive and be unobserved as you did.
Then you were observed. All of you, all at once. Whatever came of that mind that comprehended you, you don't know. It could have been that their brain devolved to static, that their eyes melted out of their skull. Beings on the lower planes could not hold you in their head, they could not withstand the entirety of you for long without breaking. There is something about making someone break that is satisfying; there is something about it that is also extremely devastating. You do not know at any moment which you will find it.
You have, over the years, broken a few minds, broken a few bodies. You wish you knew how to show affection the way humans do; you wish you knew how to show hatred the way humans do. The feeling of anger, so deep it settles into your bones and blood is a familiar blanket over you, but you also know such a keen happiness that it makes your stomach roil to think to hate. But you could. You could anger, you could rage. You could rip and tear this world beneath you into so many ribbons and pieces until it is unrecognizable.
This world beneath you, over which you are lounging, has already been torn up.
You have already been torn up.
You know that you do not want to return to a state of senselessness now that you know what it is to have a form. You are watching the roots of your feeling shuffling between the world that you can see and the world that you cannot, and sometimes you still feel. You feel a deep anger directed at yourself, and it’s enough to make you wish you could put your own body in your tentacles and tear yourself apart. It hurts. It hurts so much. Why does it hurt so much?
Sometimes you feel hollow, empty. Sometimes you feel like you’re painting over that emptiness with a fine veneer of joy. Sometimes you feel so desperate you could start eating yourself. When you fall from the sky, you feel as if you are falling into the waiting arms of your feelings, ready to sort through what is actually yours and what does not belong to you. What belongs to those men you used to be a piece of.
What you wouldn’t give to be a piece of something again. You didn’t realize how lost you were until you were something with nothing inside you. You want to replicate the world around you because, well, that’s something, isn’t it. Would you have been better, fuller, if you had allowed yourself to give into the hate?
The hate is too easy; you know it too well. The hate feels sometimes like it will crawl up your throat and out of your mouth or your ear or any number of the numerous orifices on your face. Well, your real face.
Look like them. Build yourself to be like them all you want, but you’re still something else. Something beyond them. All of them, if they were to see you for what you actually were, would that break them? Would their eyes burn out of their skulls?
He takes your hand, and you think you feel movement inside of you. She reaches out to you, not with her hands but with her words. You know how she is, this is how she does it. She makes you part of her people. You are their people, their friend. If they saw your true face, would they survive?
They don’t seem worried about that.
You think you love them. You think you know what love is. He is standing in front of you and defending you from those people who don’t understand. He is with you, he is with you. You feel so close to them, even though you have never been close to them. You feel like you could be like them, even though you know you’re not.
Hey, Dood. When you return to your home beyond the planes, where only those things like you live, you’ll remember them, right? They’re your friends, aren’t they?
You fell from the sky. The sky split in two, and you were no longer looking at everything. You could only look at them, you could only look with them. At their level, like you were a person too.
And since you sort of knew what it was like to be a person, too, maybe you stopped being a god.
(Or you became a better god. No one talks up here. No one will tell you if you’re doing a good job, if you’re supposed to be doing anything at all.)
You look at them. You see them feel some kind of happiness, some kind of sadness, some kind of emotion beyond the veil of hollowness, and you think that you are doing a good job.