The Sound You Have Always Been Inside

by Leonid Tchah

I should say at the outset that I am still not entirely certain how to categorize what happened when I first encountered this information, which is part of why I am writing about it.

The cosmic microwave background radiation is the oldest light in the universe. It is not metaphorically old in the way we sometimes say something is ancient when we mean merely historical. It is the afterglow of the early universe itself — photons released approximately 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the plasma that constituted all matter cooled enough to become transparent, and light was finally permitted to travel freely. That was 13.8 billion years ago. The radiation is still here. It is still detectable. It fills all of space, including this space, including the space currently occupied by you reading this, and by me writing it.