The Sundering - Keir Hudson

There was once a time where everything had a single soul. All was of one mind, and there was a sense of perfect harmony and peace.

One day, the soul was shattered into a near infinite number of pieces. The pieces were broken into smaller and smaller bits, creating fractals of existence. The soul became worlds, and the worlds broke into nations, and the nations broke into families, and the families broke into people, and the people broke into emotions, and so on.

With this breaking came conflict and strife. Instead of being one thing, the pieces were now many, and in being many they were now different from one another. This conflict caused the pieces pain - nations went to war, families broke apart, people lost themselves.

In many cases the conflict was caused by the pieces believing that they should still be one. A person would look to their neighbor and think, “Why does this person think something different from me? Why do they feel differently from how I do?” The person would become distressed, their piece of the soul wanting to go back to being one again, but never being able to do so. This distress would often turn to hatred - for the other person, or for themselves.

 Despite their now disparate nature, all of the pieces of soul were still made from the same substance. As a result, they maintained the ability to resonate with one another, causing patterns to form within the fractured bits. Though the pieces could never truly return to being one, they could still experience empathy for each other by recognizing these patterns. This often worked imperfectly, but it could be enough to bring the pieces closer together so that they could stick.

 Yet within the secret, there is another secret. Wisdom, being of the soul, can often be found in fractals as well.

While unity is what the pieces of the soul want, often what they need is to remain broken. In becoming multifarious, the soul gained the ability to be more than just one thing. The shattering was necessary, because it allowed the pieces to perform different roles to improve the functioning of the whole. The shattering was beautiful, for it allowed us to discover an uncountable number of new experiences, each one unique to the piece that finds it.

Rejoice in the sundering of the soul, my friend.

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Keir Hudson considers his work as a social worker, his work as a writer, and his work as a human being to be extensions of one another. He has published work in the "Dreamscapes and Daydreams" anthology from Wingless Dreamer, as well as in the online publications Please See Me, Humans of the World, and Half and One. He is in the process of writing his first novel. This is an experimental work that could be classified as either creative nonfiction or flash fiction.