Single-cells, back then, all with one thought in mind, one set of ideals, and one resource to go on -- soup. Monocellular kids at the beginning of summer, carving their initials on a tree with TLF (True Love Forever) underneath them, gazing starstruck at each other and swearing that June will never end, that the next month will be another June, and the month after that as well, that the soup will last forever and the stars will never turn out to be gas and dust.

Evolution happens, regardless of the fairy stars, whether you call it a fall from grace or a biological inevitability. one cell becomes two, two cells four, four cells demand a region on the shore, eight cells begin to prefer the soup at a particular time of day, sixteen cells become a committee, thirty two a colony, sixty four a quorum, one hundred and twenty eight a tribe, lingering in the shallows and realizing that it's late August, and the days are starting to get shorter, and that their single cell love from June has also turned into one hundred and twenty eight, two hundred and fifty six, even as they watch, and that their particular shape now dictates that where once the single cells gazed together and identically myopically at a glittering sky, now their affection for each other and their taste for soup has combined to form a taste for the other, the one now waits to guiltily feed on the other's corpse, and the other feeds on the one's, in turn; plants and animals as ex-lovers. The summer tree has grown taller, the initials filled in with scar tissue but not forgotten, and the fact that they ever touched the tree at all makes September that much more painful. five hundred and twelve. Their eyes meet, and drop away. It's no good anymore.

Watch for the fractal miniatures. Babies have it all in common. There are no nation-lines between babies, and all of them agree on the essentials. The warm teat is good, sleep is an occasional vice to be smuggled in, shiny colors are captivating and sitting on top of the dryer can make anyone smile. No strife, no competition. Specialization, inexorable as September, is yet to come. Even in kindergarten, most things remain common -- these toys are fun, roller-coasters produce strange feelings, horse poop looks almost edible but doesn't smell it. My friends have bodies, same as I do, and the sitting in class and waiting for more facts to be paraded in front of us has a compelling resonance, not entirely comfortable nor entirely boring. Time goes by. one thousand and twenty four. People find their favorite TV shows, gender roles, best friends. Commonalities begin to drift apart in a sea of choices. Who can choose to afford what product, who likes what food, what movies, what causes, which specific stars. Where once the warm teat sufficed, now a hundred restaurants cater to your particular whim, your way right away, and we gaze across the food court and wonder where we diverged, exactly. Mr. Rogers tells us that there's nobody in the whole world exactly like us, and it's only later that the yawning silence contained therein comes home to us. There *is* no-one exactly like you, not now, not any more.

We all start off hurtling from the same cliff's edge, and 9.8 is 9.8 to everyone. On the way down the dreams begin, pulling us, and the cliff face begins sliding by in slightly different ways, the marmalade jars lining the hole parading slightly different labels, the smoke of our daydreams bringing new and different gravities until we're living in an Escher print in the rock, one person's staircase another's decorative ceiling, one person's chair another's coat-rack, one's door another's window, one's meal another's abstract sculpture. We pass on the stairways, perhaps, and nod uncomfortably to each other, and try not to feel the vertigo as we're forced to think about our walls as floors, and we hurry on into the next room, where we're sure everything will be anchored to sides *we* know are correct. Sometimes, they even are.

Intermittently, between the disorienting periods of free fall, rooms there are where you find yourself agreeing with some your fellow travelers, laughing and clasping hands, and those who find them and know it try to hang onto them as though their time here depended on it. Evolution steps on, each day a fractal mirror of the planetwide march carrying us down the cliff face towards September, and the coming winter. Find the ones who see even one place the same as you, who agree that when you come home at night and sit on your bed and take your shoes off, they should each fall to the same floor, and produce the same thump. Someone else's shoes would float, or punch through the entire building on their way to the center of their earth, and to find even one law of physics in common with someone, let alone a set, is a miracle no less than two identical snowflakes, and to be treasured as highly and missed as keenly, once gone.

two thousand forty eight. Tomorrow's trees could still have room for more initials, but today's are scarred. Tomorrow could be the beginning of another summer, but there's a chill air tonight that would seem to give the lie to that. Middle school becomes high school; high school college; college some chaotic combination of the simple equations we began with, any one of which is comprehensible, laughably simple, three or more of which combine to create a non-repeating chaos and make us into Gandhi and Dahmer and Anthony and Lee, Buchenwald and Xanadu. four thousand ninety six. Small differences breed larger, and the choose-your-own adventure book has required so many scribbled notes and backwards glances, frantic calls to the publisher for emergency shipments of more pages ("she's chosen *that* one -- bring on volume two hundred and twelve") that when you come to class to present your book report, you're almost guaranteed to be greeted with a stony silence, as everyone wonders just what in the hell you've read. eight thousand one hundred ninety two. Don't talk to *him* -- he's got cooties. You want to do *what*? Put that down. How can you possibly like that? Why don't you understand me? sixteen thousand three hundred and eighty four. The moments of union are ineffably sweet, the hope that the lottery ticket will show up and bring you back to Eden almost justifies the investment it takes to keep that hope afloat. Each set of eyes you look into could remember the same single-celled days you do. Maybe Ed McMahon will turn up at your door in a van, driving on what you've always maintained in your heart was a road, not a wall. Maybe. We leap at the possibility, we shy away from the potential for error. We hope.

Singing, cardigan'd, Mister Rogers was right, and his shoes fell off the same way every day. In the end, we're all of us careening down the same cliff at different times, and it's just our indifferent luck that has spread us out from the ocelot, the sequoias, the protozoa, and the little creatures living on lobster's mouths, who must have nearly wriggled themselves to joy when the scientific community discovered them. Hope, you see, burns eternal in someone's breast, all the time. Instead of some scientist, it could have been Ed McMahon. Maybe it will be next time.

thirty two thousand seven hundred and sixty eight. It's only happenstance that's spread us out from ourselves, but it's got gravity on its side, on all its sides, and the cliff bottom is inevitably big enough for all of us, even in winter. Stretch out your hands even as the wind of your passage gets stronger, hope that someone's shoes will fall next to yours for a while, and think back to a sky full of stars on a summer night, some millions of years ago.