I’ve been so deep inside my own head this month — my own gold, my own dead worlds, my own guilt — that I missed the most important thing until tonight, and it took the woman at the next desk to show me.
She caught me at the coffee machine and said, apropos of nothing, in this careful voice, “You seem different lately. Lighter.” And then she paused, and I watched her decide to risk something, and she said: “Can I ask you something strange? Do you ever feel like you’re — not from here?”
I nearly dropped the cup.
She’s one too. The one I knew in the gold. Of course she is. And she’s been quietly waking up on her own side of the office the same weeks I’ve been waking up on mine, neither of us saying a word, each of us assuming we were the only lunatic in the building. We talked for an hour. We were late for everything. I haven’t talked to another human being like that since — well. Since the gold, probably.
And it sent me back to that number from the second night, the one that knocked the wind out of me — sixty million, then three hundred and fifty million, the count climbing every time somebody asks. Plus another half a billion, the material says, of a second kind: not wanderers like me but graduates of other worlds entirely, come to lend a hand with whatever this planet is about to become. Hundreds of millions of us. Hundreds of millions. And I’d been walking around feeling like the single most alone soul on the face of the Earth.
We’re everywhere. That’s the thing I want you to hear tonight, whoever you are reading this. The material talks about a new kind of energy already coming into this world — a higher one, the fourth-density one, the love-and-understanding one — and about people quietly lighting up to it, one at a time, all over the planet, mostly in secret, mostly certain they’re the only one. Finding each other at coffee machines. Recognizing each other across rooms. An army of the homesick, waking up.
I’m not the lone fallen wanderer with two planets to answer for. I’m one of an enormous, scattered, half-asleep crowd of us — and we are starting, finally, to find each other. There is so much more of us than I knew.