I stood inside what seemed a small hut, such as shepherds use in their spring pasturage. A man sat, face hidden by smoke coming from a fire in the center of the room. He rose as I came in, and I gasped. My father, dead now these many years. Two chairs in the room, on either side of the flame: He smiled at me, and gestured for me to sit.

I tried to speak, but found that I could not. It was not shock that had taken my voice, nor the situation: I could not speak, words would not form, my tongue would not obey. I was not allowed to speak, by some force I couldn’t understand. I sat down. He smiled at me, and there was great sadness in his eyes. At last he spoke.

“The first myth that ever was my son is of the maiden Earth and the bearded Sky.” I could see the room wavering, my father seemed to be growing. Was it that I was growing smaller? This was a story he had told me before, when I was a boy. I knew it well, for it was the creation myth of the people I had come from. From nothing came the unified mountain of Heaven and Earth, Heaven called An, Earth called Ki. Was it a dream, a memory?

“Together, alone in creation, they loved for a length of time so long that time itself had no meaning, and all recorded time since then has failed to equal or measure the length of that moment they shared.”

In the darkness he stood, and put his hand on my shoulder. It was as if a window had suddenly appeared, and looking out from it I could see the birds wheeling over the fields I had known as a boy.

“But this love was so perfect, so wonderful, that there was no space in it for anything else. Your own mother and father, my son,” there a broad smile I can feel in the darkness, “had to move apart to allow for you. What child could be raised by parents whose full contemplation of each other could not cease? Where could there be life, where there was not room? The closeness of father Earth and mother Sky, these suffocated creation.”

I heard that voice, speaking in that dark room, that I had not heard in so many years. So many more years than I had been gone, for it was the voice of my father in the prime of his life, my father as I had first known him when the world was so much bigger than I was, and he had stood watch over me. I had forgotten my father, like this, I knew, long before I lost him. My eyes were wet with tears.

“So the old gods, the ones behind the world, the ones whose names not I, nor the priests, know or have known—they created air, a burning spear, and cast it between the two lovers. Each has since stayed in the domain appointed them, for the fullness of time, and waited while we grew from nothing into this wondrous city, to the civilization we have become. So they say.”

And this was, I remembered, the story of the birth of the God Enlil, whose shrine was in the city of Nippur. I felt again, that hand on my shoulder, even as I felt the room around me disappearing. It was a light hand now, that of an old person, shaky and infirm but with that fervent pressure of the aged—reassuring themselves, I now thought, that the world had not yet slipped from them entirely.

“But I think, son, that they chose themselves. Not that their love had failed, not that they had grown tired. But in every love story, I think there is the knowledge that more than the moment of consummation, more than the moment of , there is the moment of sacrifice, when each realizes what they would give for the sake of the other. “

The room vanished.