They had started falling towards the Sun when they were young. The tug of that luminous solar entity, the enticement toward the bright bottom of his gravity well, had been the closest thing they had known of love until regal Jupiter, exerting influence across a dissipating accretion disc, nudged them gently into a stable orbit presided over by the lording planet.
There, the asteroid remained, rounding mighty Sun with deference and equanimity, whilst pledging fealty to the Jovian sovereign whose gravitational dominion seemed supreme. Indeed, they seemed to be only a vassal of Jupiter’s imperial might in those long, silent eternities. Yet it was the Sun that would master them in the end, and it was the Sun that would bring them home.
Home? What was home to them? They had never been home, nor been part of anything larger than themselves. If not for Jupiter’s constant reassurance, they would’ve drifted off into the black, or even more likely, would’ve begun their plunge towards the Sun much sooner, at a time when the shape of the solar system was still indeterminate.
Jupiter’s gravity was powerful, however, and it influenced their path through space and time for eons. Only a consequential disruption could ever interrupt the elemental relationship between such a massive planet, the relatively minute asteroid, and the star they both had in common.
That disruption - and consequential it was - occurred on an occasion when another asteroid of similar size and composition intersected their orbital path. It seemed pre-ordained; The paths of the two asteroids had crossed many times, and the way between the bodies always cleared before a potential impact. Yet despite this delicate choreography, entropy was destined to prevail, and prevail it did - spectacularly.
The outcome left them smaller than they were before; the impact shattered both asteroids into many pieces. But the better parts of them were free of Jupiter’s gravity and travelling through a vast darkness, in thrall to the solar winds that strengthened as they journeyed toward the planets of the inner system.
They remained undifferentiated from their environment during that time. Having been exiled from the sustaining Jovian influence, they slept, if a consciousness such as theirs - a consciousness the size of a mountain - could be said to sleep. And in that sleep, they dreamed. They dreamed of starry oblivion without end, and of time outside time where they would drift, absolutely, forever. They were sleeping, though, and they didn’t notice that they were now sliding towards the Sun.
They dreamt of traversing the spans between asteroids, and of Mars, a ruddy star whose orbital path they crossed - skipping like a pebble on a river in slow motion - while the planet traversed the Sun’s far side.
And they dreamed, at last, of a blue-green and distant orb, Terra, regularly obscured by the shadow of her Moon, but coming closer until the pull of her gravity well stirred something on the asteroid, and woke them from their hundred-million-year slumber.
Their adoration of the blue-green orb - that love - was the bottom of Terra’s gravity well calling. Its allure was the promise of an end to their journey, of a perfect sorrow embedded in the nature of things. What does the end of the journey have to do with the beginning of another? Only they knew the answer - with a knowing beyond language - that they were the light that appeared in primordial skies in the deep dark before dawn, growing larger with each passing morn, until they were visible in the daylight, too.
They had differentiated, at last, and found a place to satisfy their desire for inertia. Was that home? They had always been in motion, since the beginning. Here, at last, they would find rest, even though rest meant devastating Terra, and the rough start of a new era on that blue-green orb.
After 65 million years on the planet of their homecoming, some animals found the place where the asteroid came to rest. These animals - beings who were conscious in their own way - owed their very existence to the catastrophe the asteroid had wrought eons earlier; beings who conceived, in fact, that there is a way it was like to be a big rock falling from the sky.
