Dots in the Cosmos
He was obsessed with the smallest particles. The component parts, the building blocks. He was, many would say, the type of person who couldn't help but reduce things down to their most irreducible forms. He thought about this as he spent the final few moments of his miserable life flailing in a downward freefall, his spacesuit violently disintegrating upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere.
He thought many things. He thought: what am I but a little ant, writhing my limbs helplessly, no more fit to live than a bug in a child's hand? He thought about merciless physics, the crushing, fundamental will of the universe, the way things want to be, wanting to pull everything together again.
The universe was a singularity once; my form was the form of everything else. And I believe it will be again, until it explodes into yet another epoch. The same but different.
He thought: my silver thread has been sliced and now I descend, a fiery, incandescent raindrop. Falling like infinitesimal sugar granules through the flame. Falling through the burning fumes into a dark glass of aqua-green absinthe. Far below, an ominous Pacific ocean was swirling mightily. Night was cascading across the deep.
He thought back to his childhood, the hot days spent out in the front yard. A strange little rhumba rhythm played in his head. He thought about Monday night dinners -- rice and beans and rhubarb pie -- and the long summer days spent dreaming of being an astronaut. And then his years as a young aviator, a daredevil, a Screaming Eagle. His buddies in the 8th fighter wing. He always lived as if there was no tomorrow. Maybe that was the problem.
Locked in freefall, staring into the omni, he thought -- finally -- that death is fundamentally no different than birth: the entrance into a new realm, the darkness giving way to light, the harsh newness of a fresh world. Of sights and sounds that need to be learned and categorized. He was strangely calm and unafraid.
He thought all of these things, each of them private and separate and shared with nobody, as his own particles were ripped apart and scattered across the exosphere.
He thought many things. He thought: what am I but a little ant, writhing my limbs helplessly, no more fit to live than a bug in a child's hand? He thought about merciless physics, the crushing, fundamental will of the universe, the way things want to be, wanting to pull everything together again.
The universe was a singularity once; my form was the form of everything else. And I believe it will be again, until it explodes into yet another epoch. The same but different.
He thought: my silver thread has been sliced and now I descend, a fiery, incandescent raindrop. Falling like infinitesimal sugar granules through the flame. Falling through the burning fumes into a dark glass of aqua-green absinthe. Far below, an ominous Pacific ocean was swirling mightily. Night was cascading across the deep.
He thought back to his childhood, the hot days spent out in the front yard. A strange little rhumba rhythm played in his head. He thought about Monday night dinners -- rice and beans and rhubarb pie -- and the long summer days spent dreaming of being an astronaut. And then his years as a young aviator, a daredevil, a Screaming Eagle. His buddies in the 8th fighter wing. He always lived as if there was no tomorrow. Maybe that was the problem.
Locked in freefall, staring into the omni, he thought -- finally -- that death is fundamentally no different than birth: the entrance into a new realm, the darkness giving way to light, the harsh newness of a fresh world. Of sights and sounds that need to be learned and categorized. He was strangely calm and unafraid.
He thought all of these things, each of them private and separate and shared with nobody, as his own particles were ripped apart and scattered across the exosphere.
posted by Jeweled Accumulation at 11:41 AM
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