Wandering Into the Hum

There I was, on the couch, swallowed by that familiar mix of fear, anxiety, and emptiness.

I turned to Time and asked,
“Go back. Find the last time I was truly happy… free of fear, anxiety, doubt, and questions.”

Time carried me back. I asked it to stop a few days earlier, where I believed I had been happy.
It paused, and I stood beside the version of me from then, watching myself.

To my surprise, I wasn’t radiantly happy.
There was a quiet disturbance in my eyes. Something I couldn’t pinpoint, maybe a faint fear of loss.

So I said, “Go back a little more. I’m sure there must be a moment where I was completely happy, completely unafraid.”

Time paused, then carried me further back.

But the truth was the same. There was no complete joy and no pure freedom. There was always a flicker of fear or anxiety. A doubt or a question was hiding in the background.

Then I thought:

“Surely when my children were born… I must have been happy without fear then.”

So I asked time to take me to those moments.

And yes, I was happy.
So overwhelmingly, breathtakingly happy.

But fear lived there too.

I saw myself in the delivery room, looking at that tiny body still covered in placenta, hearing its first cry.
I watched my own heart erupt like a volcano. Emotion spilling over, searing and molten and I felt the thought tear through me:

“All the love in the world isn’t enough for this child.
How do I bring more?
How do I protect this?”

Even in the most sacred moment of my life, fear stood beside joy.

So I told time, “Take me further back.”
Back into childhood.

But even there, something unsettled me.
A restlessness.
A tiny piece of me looking over her shoulder, burying her head in her knees, pacing up and down.

“Take me back to a time I was truly, completely happy,” I demanded.

Time moved back again.
It took me to when I was a fetus in my mother’s womb.

But it didn’t stop there.

It moved past that life, and the one before, and the one before that —
past memories, past identities, past stories.

Time kept going…
and going…
and going…

Until finally, it stopped.

And there, at the very beginning, I dissolved completely.
There was no me.
There was no sky, no air, no world, no universe, not even the God I had been looking for.
All that existed was pure bliss and the hum.
A sound before time, before thought, before story, endless and boundless and alive.

Still here on my couch, wrapped in fear, anxiety, and emptiness. I stare into the eyes of time, trying to draw the hum back into my heart, my body, my soul, my being.