Twenty-three hours and a million years ago, Jeff was worried about getting into college.
His physical human body actually laughed out loud at the notion. It seemed so absurd now that he was so stressed over such a thing. Everything is relative, this was true. But now he was more concern about his relatives... his friends... and in fact all of the human race.
His extreme evolution of the past thirteen hours had finally left him trying to catch up with his current reality. At first, it had seemed so heady. He felt so powerful. Then, he felt unreal. Then as he explored more, he felt wonder. Then as his explorations went deeper, outside the bounds of time and space that he had known all his life, he became aware of connection, relativity, his place in all of it, and all of it his place to... well, there was no word in English, but somem words that started to explain this new comprehension... to care about. To live in. To be one with. It was funny how words simply fell flat when presented with the experiences of what they were meant to mean.
Then there is the entity.
Jeff shook in remembrance, in that secret place in his being. His physical body would have shaken - teeeth chattered - had he not willed this reaction be kept private from the entity and any others who might be watching.
He walked deep into his mindscape, down a dark and old thought-path of his own life - or one that felt old to the most Jeff of him, even though it was relatively new when compared to the age of this multiverse he lived in. Again with time, he thought. There was the persistance of concept that insisted there was no time when in fact time itself was a construct and didn't really exist, not as such anyway. Trying to truly grok time as a human being was very much like a greased pig trying to catch a salmon swimming upstream; it just doesn't really happen - it's not like peanut butter and chocolate at all and can't really exist in the same place in any meaningful and non-disaster kind of way.
The Jeff that is, then reasserted himself in his deep mindscape, taking it deeper and deeper into the non-dimension dimension that was intuited by the physical dimensions he encountered daily but that could not be directly proven to exist by them, as such. In this non-physical reality it was curious that he borrowed physical manifestations to help him grapple with the truths he had discovered just a few minutes ago, truths which in and of themselves superseded the physical, the metaphysical, and the annex realms that by and large hadn't been discovered by humankind yet (except for one woman who lived in the Australian outback, who everyone thought was stark raving nuts... which she was, but ironically she just happened to be right too).
Then what Jeff sought... he sensed he was getting very close to. Yes. He rounded a bend in the path of his twilight mind, stepping over the roots of consciousness that threatened to trip him up with percieved notions of unlimited impossibilities, something, he reasoned, that one is wise not to get entangled with - especially if one is seeking possibilities and more specifically hope, instead. That was one challenge of balance - something always threatened it. You can't run around completely unorganized like strange matter, unable to form building blocks of cohesive systems, but you don't want to petrify with the over-organization of your average political committee either or you never get anything meaningful done becuase of it, but rather in spite of it.
Jeff exhaled, just as he realized he had been holding a breath since facing the entity that has always been here. Eternity lived here, in infinite possibility. And this, this possibility, this hope, was exactly what Jeff was looking for.
He spoke to her, in every way that he spoke to the entity, in that moment-compressed eternity of language beyond language, word beyond words, emotion beyond reasoning, and reasoning beyond all he had previously known, an intuition of the transdimensional transcendental. She manifested in his dreamscape projection as his oldest friend and confidant, Sarah. She was the human relational representation of all that he needed now, all that he sought. She accepted him into her arms. He buried his face in her warmth.
And he wept.
And in the weeping, as in a single star reflected in the rainfall of sorrow, something gathered, pooled within his depths, growing in the very beating life of his quintessential center existing deeper than heart, deeper than soul.
Hope.