In four billion years, Andromeda will collide with our galaxy. Through their slow, incendiary crawls - a seemingly imperceptible dance - the two galaxies will collapse into an invisible center, begetting a new cosmic entity so volatile, our heavens will glow with the bleeding light of its stellar-genesis.
But such a cataclysmic event is something we can only postulate: diagrams and simulations, equations and theories. Instead, we walk through wildfire smoke blinded by the ash of some distant tragedy; then, we shuffle through a store, watch the patterns of rainfall emerge on a window, listen to the highway at night, until everything amalgamates into a static hum, a lullaby for vacant forms.
In the mornings, I don my life as if it were the carcass of someone I do not know. Heavy and strange, I find comfort in its weight.
Amongst shadows after work, I catch distorted projections of things I cannot discern: a shape elongated across pavement, a lanky beast roaming the waking world. But I look up and see it is merely another person, small and hurried, striding through the streets as if late for some meeting or class, or perhaps in avoidance altogether. I wonder if they know their own shadow - I speak to them as if they do - but then I recall to know is to crane your neck somewhere it does not want to go: around like a barn owl, upside down like a bat. Forms continue to peer distantly before themselves or passively below. I ask if they feel the ground beneath us move, I ask if they know of the earth’s trembling inhale, a sneeze stoked by the dust-like impressions of our feet. But they merely look back as if I were the intangible shadow that chases them, the very thing they can’t contain.
On Thursday I walk through the park at lunchtime and wish things were different; on Friday I sit in the audience of my coworker’s thesis defense and change nothing at all.
I fold one of the pages of the neurology pamphlet I am handed into tiny paper stars, and throughout the hour, cradle them in my hand like stardust waiting to scatter. Words peer at me between the folds: elaborate paragraphs on neuron mapping reduced to incoherent fragments. My eyes connect disjointed letters and phrases across the origami surface. Soon, a microcosm unfolds; constellations of feeling beneath rationality burn, moth holes and cigarette burns. And through these seams - the space between words, the gaps within reason - each star illuminates, until all which is left unsaid speaks like the mouth of God himself, like the light which can only be let in. So I let it in, a hallowed ray from a star’s distant center - and am struck, struck with the piercing arrow of a desire too deadly to hold. Falling, I look around: everyone has left. So I leave too and make my way back to the office, a wounded God trying to resurrect a forgotten cosmos.
In mid-June, I stare into the sun as it unyieldingly hangs. I then watch its inverted impression dance across my vision, colors coalescing until they vanish.
I find it hard not to be disoriented by the heat. The smoke from Canada vanished quickly, but the fire still remains. It is easy to look into the sun and want it to wound you, for it to not hide behind ash in shame; but it is different when it beats upon you, and you understand it was never the sun which shamefully punished you from lofty heights, but yourself, in knowing you only ever wanted the world in its impressions, recollections, dreams. Now the vague patterns of life happen before you, as you walk through streets gone, and you can’t come back, can’t turn around through this arid world without something to grasp onto. So you fumble, you cry, burn holes in the fabric of your life if only to remember the very thing you will never live to see, made in the image of what you cannot be.
In four billion years, we will not be. We tell stories of how it will happen, we craft ideologies with the fact it has. Slowly, we live our deaths, and yet, it is too quick to see.
So we look around: the feather of a sparrow, the glint of broken glass. These fragments of totality become eternity, punctum tearing us and enduring our wounds. Perhaps, it is through such unfulfilled instances - stars long gone, fires once burning - that an ecstatic truth, unseemly in its manner, can find us.
But I am not certain.
I tentatively wait for the collision. I tentatively rewrite time as I do.
And somewhere, in my infernal waiting, every part of myself breaks through.