Who would have thought that a particle could have a mind of its own?
This particle was aware that there had never been a proper name for itself. It was, after all, a tiny piece of something. It was a body having a finite mass. It was an extremely small constituent of matter. You really had to be aware of the existence of a thing before trying to come up with a name for it. Although not being completely accurate, the word particle seemed to do well enough.
It had never become apparent to the Earth-dwellers that particles actually had a thought process, indeed one that never stopped running. Like the thought processes, particles simply don’t just stop being particles. Someone came up with the idea concerning the conservation of energy. Well, they got that right. It had recently learned, and one can only imagine how, that something called the God Particle was all the buzz in the world of science. Of course, the particle had no sense of humour; if it did, it would laugh.
This particular particle felt it self rather fortunate, it had travelled widely. Some particles hardly moved at all. Some lay buried deep in the earth, part of a coffin or a tree root or clinging to a stone. Hey! Who could tell? There had never been a lot of communication between particles, but there was some.
This particle had been fascinated to learn about one of its kind being intravenously injected into, and then travelling through, the body of a woman. It had been carried to the brain stem where it sadly observed the loss of her involuntary functions, resulting in her demise. Luckily, not wishing to spend a long and uncertain period of enforced hibernation underground, that particular particle had managed to find itself on a tissue sample, removed during the autopsy.
At this point, our particle… it can now be referred to as our particle, since enough has been revealed about its very existence for the term to be used with a sense of familial comfort… our particle had been soaking up the late afternoon’s sun of a summer’s day, on a cheese and pickle roll, on a paper plate, on a café table, in a small country town, a little south-west of… well, a little south-west of somewhere.
Our particle is about to be eaten by a girl who has never liked the food they serve up in either airports or on the planes that fly in and out of them. She has left the nearby dress shop where she works early today, and is about to join her friend in a taxi. She has been saving up for ages to go on holiday with her girlfriend.
Our particle waits anxiously, whether or not giving such an emotional attribute is reasonable, it does however find itself nestling between the atoms that once made up the flesh of an apple that has since been chopped and mixed with other ingredients that now form the relish that is spread across the slices of tasty vintage cheese being held in the remaining portion of two buttered halves of a crusty sesame seed roll.
She looks up as the taxi honks and her friend opens the window and waves excitedly. She stands, gathers her belongings along with her suitcase and pauses momentarily, looking down at the remainder of her food. She takes a moment to pop the remaining piece of roll into her mouth and runs to the waiting vehicle.
Yay! The particle is on its way to Majorca!