The Cycle of Wonder: The Last Question

A haze of forgotten memories brushed against me, faint and fleeting, like the echo of a dream beyond reach.
I did not know then that this was the beginning and the end, the cycle’s return.

I once loved the stars.
Through a boy’s eyes, the night sky shimmered with infinite questions and promises.
I loved science.
The universe was a riddle to solve, and starlight, a beacon calling me forward.

I knew of God, but He was a tradition, a backdrop, a piece of culture.
I prayed, but my prayers turned inward.
My faith stood not on grace but on the foundation of my own knowledge and ability.
The key to truth, I believed, lay not in God but in science.

Then one day, a book found its way into my hands.
Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question.
I turned the pages, following humanity and AI through time and eternity, until I reached the final line:

“Let there be light.”

A tremor passed through me.
It was not a chill or a shock but something quieter—an invisible ripple in the air, a shift too subtle to name.
The world seemed to pause, holding its breath, and for a fleeting second, I felt as if I stood on the edge of something vast and unknowable.

I called it wonder.
Not faith, not revelation, but the awe of order—the sublime elegance of a universe ruled by law and reason.

That night, I buried the tremor deep and moved on.
I would forget it.
But it would not forget me.

Life unraveled.
The dream of becoming an astrophysicist shattered.
Illness swept through my body, and the plans I had built crumbled into ruin.
What followed was not living.
It was falling—slow and soundless, without end.
Morning and night blurred into one, and the world beyond my window faded into a distant abstraction.
I became a presence without a voice, a body without warmth.
The days passed, or perhaps they didn’t.

Then came the night when everything inside me collapsed.
Life drained out, meaning dissolved.
I let go.

But death did not come.

I remained.
Not alive, but not gone.
A shadow, left behind.

And in the hollow of that silence, God found me.

I did not seek Him.
I had no strength left to search.
But He found me first.

There was no voice and no vision, only a certainty that pressed softly but unmistakably into the cracks of my ruin.
Through a path I could never have paved, He placed me back into life.
A job.
A small, improbable miracle.
The world began to turn again, hesitant but real.

Yet I did not step into His house.
I felt His touch but kept my distance.
Faith remained something apart from me—a door unopened.

Until one day, the call returned.
This time, I did not turn away.

I entered the church and joined the choir.
I had sung before; my voice had once mingled with hymns.
But this was not a song of habit.
It was an answer.

My voice, thin and uncertain, rose from somewhere untouched by reason.
I did not understand it, but something within me gave way.
A silence that knowledge had never filled—
softened.
And I sang.

My life grew lighter, shaped by grace and slow repair.
Yet Asimov, The Last Question, and the tremor I had buried—
all of it had vanished from memory, dissolved into a past I no longer recalled.

Then, one evening—
A YouTube recommendation.
Without thought, I clicked.

“Isaac Asimov – The Last Question”

The screen brightened, and the story unfolded before me.
The words felt unfamiliar, yet the space they occupied felt known, like a room I had once entered but could not remember.

I watched.
A story of humanity’s question and the machine’s search.
Of time’s slow unraveling and the fading of every star.
The universe dimmed toward its end, and the question pressed on—
unanswered.

I listened as if hearing it for the first time.
I read with the eyes of a stranger.

And then—

“Let there be light.”

A tremor pierced me.

But this was not the tremor of sixteen.
This was something else—
A fracture deep inside me, and through the break—
memory poured in.

Suddenly, I knew.
This was not my first time.
I had read these words before.
I had felt this before.

And I saw—
not just the story—
but the boy who had buried his wonder.

The past and the present touched, and time folded into itself.

The same line.
But a different tremor.

At sixteen, it was awe—
pure and sharp, a spark of knowledge.
But now—
it was recognition.

Before, I had seen the universe.
Now, I saw God.

It was never just a line.
It was a circle.
A return.
A cycle, echoing through the fabric of all things.

I understood.
“Let there be light”
was never meant to be spoken once.

The light had always been there.
I—
had simply remained too long in the dark.

I opened my lips.
And the words came—
not as an echo—
but as an answer.

“Let there be light.”

This time,
the voice was mine.

I was the question and the answer.
I was the seeker and the sought.
I was the end, and I was the beginning.

At the center of the cycle—
at last—
I created my universe.