The Not Unfirst Non-nothing

First there was nothing. That's not exactly right. There was no first
and there was no nothing. There was no first because there was no time
for any occurrence to be considered temporally relative to another.
There was no nothing because the first thing you think of when you
think of nothing is an empty space with nothing in it. There was no
space for there to be nothing in either.

Now, it turns out, when there's no nothing and there's no when even
then, it's really easy for stuff to happen. This seems
counterintuitive. You may think of it as maybe it took a trillion
years for anything to happen, but there's no difference there between
a trillion years or an instant or an eternity. So in this
pseudo-eternity-instant of non-nothing, that conceptualization that's
only there to separate the is that we know from the is-not that we
cannot know, is-not became is. Now all of a sudden we have something.
Except it's still not space and it's still not time, but it is
something and not non-nothing.

Now that we have something (again "now" is incorrect), it gets real
uncomfortable existing without anywhere to exist. So in effect
something decided to separate the is-not from itself in order to give
itself a substrate within which to exist. Now this substrate with
something in it was all that was and finally words like "Now" and
"was" have some meaning. Since there was a place to be, this meant
that something could move about within this substrate that is the
precursor to what we call space. But just like something needed a
substrate to differentiate is and is-not, in order to move there had
to be a substrate to differentiate was and was-not.

It turns out that these two substrates came together and you could not
get the one without the other. Moving something from here to there
also required moving something from then to now. So now we have a
something, a somewhere for it to be and a somewhen for it to happen.
Except it was a rather dull thing and not much did happen. Things
stayed this way for quite some time. Rather longer than you or I can
probably imagine, but at least it was a time instead of a non-time so
we that we might have the ability to attempt to imagine it now.
Luckily, for all the size of space, the is-not from whence it
originated was bigger still. And in this is-not many such spaces
sprang up here and there and then...