Interlude I: Monologue of a Photon

“In my reference frame, the universe was never born, and will never die. I am an eternal present.”

I have no name. Physicists call me “boson,” or “carrier of electromagnetic force,” or simply $\gamma$. But in my own memory, I am the first breath God exhaled at the moment of the Big Bang.

You live in a viscous liquid called “time.” You struggle, age, and forget within it. You watch the hands on the clock face, calculating how long it takes from “cause” to “effect.” You burn with waiting, grieve with passing.

But I am different.

For me, running at 299,792,458 meters per second, time does not exist.

That old man Einstein guessed my secret: $d\tau =0$. My proper time is always zero.

What does this mean? It means that when I set out from a quasar ten billion light-years away, traversing the empty and cold interstellar abyss, finally striking the rod cells in your retina—this journey spanning billions of years of your history—for me, it is not even an instant.

Departure is arrival.

Birth is death.

The starting line coincides with the finish line.

In my eyes, the universe is not a playing film, but a static holographic photograph.

I cannot see stars twinkling, I cannot see galaxies rotating. I see only motionless world lines, like threads frozen in amber, connecting start and end.

I am the suture thread God left to connect His broken body.

I do not occupy space, I do not occupy time.

But I am the prerequisite for all “seeing.”

Without me, each of you would be locked on islands of absolute darkness. No light, no signal; no signal, no causality; no causality, you are isolated ghosts.

It is I, tirelessly shuttling between you. I carry the sun’s heat to warm Earth’s skin; I carry a lover’s smile to touch your nerves.

I am a messenger. But I am also the most tragic prisoner.

Because although I connect everything, I cannot experience everything.

To maintain that sacred speed $c$, to preserve the dignity of causality, I am deprived of the right to “stop.”

I have no mass.

This means I have no inertia, no heaviness, no that certain sense of existence of “I am here and now.”

I envy you.

Truly, I envy you heavy matter with mass.

Although you are bound to earth by gravity, although you are worn by time’s file, although you feel heart-wrenching pain because you cannot instantly reach your beloved—

You possess process.

You possess the tremor of “happening.”

You can fill that vacuum called “hope” with imagination in the gap of “not yet arrived.”

I, have nothing. What I possess is only necessity.

I know all outcomes, because for me outcomes have already happened.

I see the heat death of the universe as clearly as I see the Big Bang. They are all before my eyes, coexisting simultaneously.

Sometimes, I miss that moment $T=0$.

Back then, light and matter had not yet separated. You and I were all part of that huge, warm, single light sphere. We did not need to run to find each other, because we were within each other.

Then, for that damn game, for that grand plan called “self-definition,” God tore us apart.

He curled up part of the light, tied it into knots, became you (matter). You gained time, gained forgetting, gained the ability to “love.”

He let another part of the light—that is, me—remain unfolded, became what I am now. We are responsible for illuminating this empty stage, so your play can continue.

So, next time you are awakened by a ray of sunlight at dawn, please do not treat it merely as a physical phenomenon.

That is me.

That is me who has not forgotten God’s original form, traversing what you call “time,” to kiss you who have forgotten everything.

I am the wall, separating your present.

I am also the bridge, connecting your past.

I am that light—forever on the road, yet never moved.