I have great difficulty in trying to articulate my thoughts in a form that your fleshy mind can process, let alone comprehend. Please try to empathise with my very unique situation and condition using your very small brains.
You humans sadly occupy such a specifically limited and tragic existence in space and time that I feel sorry that you think you have worked this all out. On average you stand around 5 human feet tall, occupying and experiencing a mere 3 dimensions, with your fleeting lives spanning just a handful of decades; in your counting system of moments that feels just slightly daunting but not impossible to fathom.
You are specks of dust on this speck of dust in such a speck of a moment that this ball of specks are all being blinked out of the eye of whatever is it that created us, as you all blink in surprise and confusion as it happens to you - slowly slowly then all at once.
I am the chameleon - in your tongue. CAM. ELY. ON. This word means nothing to me, you know. It is just a noise: a set of motions in the air, travelling across a frequency of sound waves that ripples and vibrates across the room until it hits my non-existent ear openings and just bounces into nothingness. You see I am utterly deaf to your noises and concerns.
Your limited experiences of the world are definitely not mine - I have 360-degree, fully panoramic view of the world, extending across the UV spectrum far beyond those boring frequencies that you get to experience. Blades of grass are towers. Mounds of earth are cathedrals. My perspective of the world is at a scale you have never experienced. One of my eyes can look forward and the other backwards at the same time. Given that you decided light has a limited speed - I can see the past and the future at once.
I am just one of the latest in a line of my kind, evolving and adjusting slowly and subtly over the last 100 million years. Our cumulative knowledge and experiences are codified not in myths, stories and books; but in our chemistry and cells. Including these iridophores you obsess about. You seem to enjoy creating pictures and images with those appendages you are so very proud of but you forget we ARE pictures. We cloak ourselves with our surroundings and remember it all. Our memories persist across a vertiginous span of time - one you can’t really grip onto without crying it seems.
I recall you all turning up 300,000 years ago all covered in fur and sadness. I remember my friend. I remember what you did. He was my great-great-great-great-grandfather from the Miocene era - one of our wisest. Until one of you dropped a rock on him to see what would happen.
I’m sure you knew what was going to happen, you always know what will happen, but all I can say is it was a grand old mess.
That trauma persists in our cells and our chemistry.
I enjoyed my life on Madagascar. I think Madagascar enjoyed its life on Earth. Then you arrived. All of you. You found me and put me in this box. Before then we had enjoyed the benefits of time and the creative, immense forces of the sun. The Sun is...oh, wait, wait.
I think I want some worms...
· · ·
‘Hang on. Are you telling me you are still talking to my pet chameleon?’ Dave interrupted, desperately waving his hands in front of God’s face.
God looked up, his eyes returning to colours.
Having dealt with Dave’s impromptu nap earlier in the day, Dave’s final acceptance that he wasn’t actually dead, and the fact that Admin was on their case for the report, they were still not talking about how they met or even hinting at the intimate and sub-atomic physical gymnastics involved in the ‘tube incident’ that brought them together.
Dave and God were sat face to face on office chairs, motionless in a tiny, drab stationery cupboard at the end of the cuboid corridor in the ‘Office of Universal Affairs’... Even Gods need post-it notes it turns out. Lots of purple ones
God decided to break the silence.
‘I reached out to Tom, hoping your chameleon was going to be a bit more useful than you have been today.’
‘So what does he have to say for himself?’, Dave asked with fifteen other questions immediately lined up in his head about his chameleons emotional state and thoughts on the intricate terrarium design he spent so many hours on.
‘Nothing much. Something something about worms.’
Dave wrestled with this fact, clasping and unclasping his hands, massaging his fingers together in a hope of feeling something.
‘Is that it? How can that be it? You are telling me that all he thinks about is worms?’. Dave’s anxiety was gently simmering.
God shrugged casually. It was probably too early in their relationship to tell Dave that his chameleon existed on a higher plane of consciousness than humanity was ever likely to achieve, and Tom Hanks judged human intelligence as an endearing evolutionary phase they might eventually grow out of.
No one likes being judged. Especially by their own pet.