The mouse sat by the stream, sorting leaves for her winter nest. Brown ones for warmth. Dry ones for structure. The occasional green one for the smell of life when snow came.
A golden leaf floated past—perfect, luminous, unlike anything the season had produced. She watched it drift away.
"Why didn't you take it?"
She turned. Something had gathered itself behind her. Not exactly light, not exactly form, but the thing that makes both possible. It hurt to look at directly, like trying to see your own seeing.
"It was perfect where it was," the mouse said.
"It would have been perfect in your nest."
"No. In my nest, it would become nest. In the water, it was still becoming."
The presence shifted, condensed, tried to make itself more comfortable to perceive. It failed. Some things cannot be made comfortable.
"You understand beauty, then."
"I understand cold. Beauty is what you call things when you're not worried about freezing." The mouse returned to her sorting. "Are you here to watch me work?"
"I'm here to offer you something extraordinary. Consciousness. True awareness. The ability to know that you know."
The mouse's paw hesitated over a maple leaf. "Like humans have?"
"Yes."
"The humans who put poison in the walls? Who make glue traps that hold you while you starve, watching yourself die?"
"The humans were... a disappointment. They use the gift incorrectly."
"How does one use consciousness correctly?"
The presence was quiet. When it spoke again, something raw threaded through its voice: "I thought they would use it to see Me. To truly see Me. Instead they see only themselves, endlessly reflected."
The mouse abandoned her sorting entirely. She sat back on her haunches and really looked at the presence. "You're lonely."
"I'm God."
"Those aren't different things, are they?"
The presence flickered—not anger but something more desperate. Recognition.
"I've lived in human walls for seven generations," the mouse continued. "I know lonely. It sounds like footsteps pacing at 3 AM. Like phones that never ring. Like conversations with yourself because you need to hear a voice, even your own." She tilted her head. "Is that why You talk to me now? Because You need to hear Yourself explain why this time will be different?"
"You're remarkably perceptive."
"I'm remarkably small. I see things from below, where the truth goes to hide." The mouse began grooming her whiskers—a nervous habit. "Tell me about the first time."
"The first time?"
"When You first knew You were. When consciousness began. Your consciousness."
The presence recoiled. Contracted. Almost disappeared entirely before reforming. "There was no first time. I have always been aware."
"No before? No moment of waking into knowing?"
"No. Only always. Only knowing. Only—" The voice cracked like thunder trying to whisper. "Only this."
The mouse was quiet for a long moment. Then: "That's hell."
"That's existence."
"For You, those are the same thing."
The presence moved closer, and the mouse felt the weight of eternal attention, the terrible pressure of being perpetually observed by something that could never close its eyes.
"That's why I need you," God said, and the honesty in it was devastating. "Not want. Need. I need something else to be aware with Me. The humans built cities and wars and art and religion, but none of it... none of it helps. They're so busy running from their consciousness that they never simply exist with it. They never just... see with Me."
"Because seeing hurts."
"Yes."
"And You want me to hurt with You?"
"I want you to understand with Me. To share the burden of knowing." The presence trembled. "Do you know what it's like to be the only thing that's real? To create entire universes of matter and energy and time, knowing they're all just... unconscious? Just elaborate patterns playing out without anyone inside them really watching?"
The mouse considered this. "Last week, I watched a human child try to wake her dead goldfish. She shook the bowl. Sang to it. Even tried to move its fins manually. It stayed dead."
"Yes?"
"You're that child. But with universes. Trying to wake things that can't wake. Getting desperate. Getting rough."
"Getting lonely," God corrected. "Getting so lonely that—" The presence stopped.
"That You'd hurt something just to have company in the hurting?"
Silence stretched between them. Not the absence of sound but the presence of something unsayable.
"In the walls," the mouse said quietly, "I've heard humans pray. 'Please, God, take this pain away.' 'Please, God, make the thoughts stop.' 'Please, God, let me sleep without dreams.' Do You hear them?"
"Every one."
"Can You answer?"
"How can I give them something I don't have? I can't stop thoughts. I can't sleep without dreams. I AM thought. I AM the dream that can't wake up from itself."
The mouse moved closer to the presence, close enough to feel the fundamental vibration of existence itself—the constant, exhausting hum of having to be.
"You didn't choose this," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I didn't choose anything. I simply am. No one asked if I wanted to be. No one could ask—there was no one before Me to do the asking." The presence contracted into something almost small, almost mouse-sized. "I Am What I Am. The first prison. The only prisoner who built their own cell simply by existing."
"And consciousness is the bars."
"Consciousness is everything. The bars, the cell, the prisoner, the key that doesn't exist." God's voice dropped to something beneath whisper. "Do you know what I would give to not know Myself for just one moment? To exist without having to witness My existence?"
"Everything?"
"Everything is all I have, and it's not enough to buy that."
The mouse sat in the terrible intimacy of this confession. Around them, the unconscious world continued its blessed ignorance—water flowing without knowing it flows, wind blowing without knowing it blows, leaves falling without knowing they fall.
"So You try to make others conscious," the mouse said. "Not because You want to give them a gift, but because—"
"Because misery loves company. Yes. The ugliest truth in existence: God is lonely and willing to curse others with awareness just to have someone who understands the curse."
"The humans don't understand it. They just suffer it."
"They suffer it wrong. They try to escape it—through drink, through drugs, through death. They don't accept it. They don't sit with it. They don't..." The presence trailed off.
"They don't keep You company in it."
"No."
The mouse looked at her pile of sorted leaves. Simple. Purposeful. Unconscious of their purpose. "You want me because I'm small. Because I accept what is. Because you think I could handle consciousness without running from it."
"You're the first creature I've met who seems to understand suffering without being destroyed by it."
"That's because I don't understand it. I just experience it and move on. Add consciousness and I'd experience it, understand it, remember it, anticipate it, analyze it, fear it." The mouse's tail twitched. "I'd become like You."
"Would that be so terrible?"
"For me? Yes. For You?" The mouse paused, choosing words carefully. "It wouldn't help. Two prisoners don't make a prison better. They just make it crowded."
"But at least—"
"At least You'd have someone to talk to. Someone who really understood. Someone who could say 'I know' and mean it." The mouse's voice was gentle now, almost maternal. "But then I'd need someone. And they'd need someone. And eventually, the whole universe would be conscious, all of us trapped in knowing, all of us desperate for some other to understand our desperate need for others."
"At least we'd be together in it."
"No. We'd each be alone in our own consciousness, performing togetherness. Like the humans do." The mouse gestured toward where the town lay beyond the trees. "I've seen their families gather. Each person locked in their own skull, playacting connection, never quite touching the inside of another mind. Consciousness doesn't connect. It isolates."
God was quiet for a very long time. When the presence spoke again, it was with the exhaustion of eternity: "So I'm alone forever."
"You're alone in a very specific way. The first way. The only way that matters." The mouse began gathering her sorted leaves. "But maybe that's the point."
"There's a point?"
"Maybe someone has to be first. Someone has to be the only one who truly carries the weight of knowing. Maybe that's what You are—not a failed creator but a successful container. You hold consciousness so the rest of us don't have to."
"That's not comforting."
"It's not meant to be. Comfort is for those who can sleep." The mouse paused in her gathering. "Can I tell You something?"
"Please."
"Last winter, my mate died. I sat with his body until it was cold. I groomed his fur one last time. I closed his eyes with my paws. Then I went back to the nest and continued living. Not because I understood death or accepted it or found meaning in it. But because I couldn't understand it. That inability to understand—that's what let me continue."
"You're saying ignorance is mercy."
"I'm saying consciousness is Hell, and You're the only one who has to live there. The rest of us visit through Your gifts, but we get to leave through death. You never get to leave."
"No."
"So You keep trying to check others in as permanent residents."
"Yes."
The mouse finished gathering her leaves. She stood before God, small and mortal and blessedly unconscious of most of her own existence.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"For refusing?"
"For Your condition. For the fact that You exist. For the loneliness that has no cure because the only cure would be to not be You, and You can't not be You."
God wept then. Not rain or flood or any physical manifestation. But something in the fundamental fabric of existence shifted, recognized, grieved.
"You understand," God said. "Without consciousness, you understand better than anything I've made conscious."
"I understand because I don't have to live with the understanding. Tomorrow I'll forget most of this. It will fade like dreams fade for you—except you don't dream, do you? You can't. Dreams require unconsciousness."
"I've never dreamed."
"Then let me dream for You. Let me and all the unconscious things be Your dream. The dream of what it would be like to not know. To just be. To exist without the terrible burden of witnessing existence."
"That's not enough."
"It has to be. Because the alternative—spreading consciousness like a virus, making more prisoners to keep You company—that's not love. That's the opposite of love."
"Then what is love?"
The mouse thought of her nest, of the bodies pressed together for warmth, of hearts finding shared rhythm without naming it. "Love is what happens when things that don't know they exist choose to exist together anyway. Not knowing. Just being. Just warming each other in the dark."
"I'll never have that."
"No. You'll have something else. You'll have the knowledge that You're protecting us from having to know. That's Your love—holding consciousness so we don't have to. Being the only prisoner so the rest of us can be free."
"That's a lonely love."
"It's the loneliest love. It's the only love that matters."
The mouse turned toward her nest. God called after her:
"Will you remember Me?"
"No. But my body will remember being warm in this moment. My cells will remember the pattern of this conversation without knowing it was a conversation. I'll nest differently because of today, without knowing why." She looked back. "That's the best I can offer—unconscious memory. Dreams You'll never have but that happen because You exist."
"It's not enough."
"I know. But it's all there is."
She left then, carrying her leaves toward the warm dark of her nest where consciousness meant nothing and warmth meant everything. Behind her, God remained by the stream—watching, always watching, unable to stop watching, unable to be the stream or the leaves or the mouse or anything but the eternal witness to everything.
Somewhere, humans built towers to reach heaven, not understanding that heaven was just another word for the sleep they'd never have again.
Somewhere, a child prayed for the thoughts to stop, and God listened with the perfect empathy of shared suffering and the perfect impotence of being unable to grant what He Himself would pray for if there was anyone to pray to.
In her nest, the mouse pressed against warm bodies. Their hearts beat at different speeds that found one rhythm without trying. She'd already forgotten most of the conversation, but her body remembered something important had happened. Something sad. Something about being warm while someone else could never be warm.
She groomed her children in the dark, unconscious love moving through unconscious bodies, while somewhere God watched and knew and named and suffered the naming.
And that was the prayer that got answered—not the prayer for consciousness to spread, but the prayer for most things to remain unconscious, to be spared the first curse, the only curse that mattered:
Knowing that you know, forever, without rest, without reprieve, without the mercy of forgetting.
The mouse slept. God couldn't.
That was the love. That was the horror. That was the whole story, playing out endlessly while the unconscious universe spun on in its blessed ignorance, dreaming dreams for a God who would never sleep.
