Heat Death
There are times the world collapses inward, slowly crushing its way towards some inevitable center. Stars spin around each other faster and faster, burning out quickly. Rocks bend and tear; trees reduced to warped splinters. Everything is moving quickly, getting smaller and smaller, spinning towards a cosmic drainpipe.
Still. Serene. Silent. A world in a pencil dot. Imagine holding the world in the palm of your hand, with a deafening quiet around you. Hot and bright. I imagine God must have felt this way, before he let it all loose upon itself. Compact and perfect. All matter has become one.
Every morning my alarm wakes me. I drag myself out of bed, and hurl myself from the depths of my subconscious into the expanding universe. My world is my own: Indifferent to my existence, yet so fully intertwined. I suppose I dictate my own existence. When all I know is fact, there is no room for confusion. A zen master of my own perception.
I shower, dress, brush my teeth, and stare into the perfect reflection of myself. Light bouncing between a wall and my eyes. I look inwards. Bags under my eyes from yet another almost-sleepless night. I stare at the copy of myself. In that perfect moment, I wonder how many copies of me are staring right back into my own two eyes.
Have you heard of the multiverse theory? Statistically speaking, given the size of the universe and the laws of physics, with only so many forms matter can take, things will begin to repeat themselves. Carbon copies of our perfect individuality. We will never meet ourselves, but they’re out there somewhere. Staring into mirrors, and thinking about you as well. What makes us different from them? Our relative position in the universe? God’s divine grace? If you were to be switched with one of them, you would not notice. You would wake in a familiar world, full of strangers whose faces you know all too well. Life would go on, and you would never see your mother again. Not your biological mother, at least.
Paired with the fact that it is unlikely our universe is the only one, you have yourself a hell of a multiverse theory. An infinite number of yous and mes running around in circles like headless chickens, screaming into the stars, begging for purpose. Some reason to be. We never stop to think that stars don’t think. And even if they did, why the hell would they care about us? We live for a second in the eyes of a star. Blink and you’re gone. Back to the earth from whence you came.
Theoretically, every repetition of us is one.. One known quantity of a life, repeated over and over again. I write the number 3 on a page over and over and over again, and it never stops being a 3. One 3 might live out its existence believing that it is the only 3. The pencil God created it for a reason. To live out its purpose between 2 and 4, serving the greater good on that long stretch to infinity. Perhaps each and every 3 believes it has some significant impact on the number line. Do you?
Because time is a flat circle. You have existed before, and you will exist again. Every day I sit class in the same seat. I solve the same mathematical equations, read the same stories about the same people. I am doomed to sit these classes, write these equations, read these stories, for all eternity. There is no end to my life, because it is not mine to end. I am a quantity. A placeholder. Mass produced down a philosophical assembly line, like a doll. All the time I have invested in myself is pointless. There is nothing special about any me. An eyepatch here, a missing tooth there, an extra finger maybe. One might see me compiled with the rest of myself as a grotesque mass of constant variables. Stretched over time and space. Perhaps I never truly existed.
At some point I eat, because that is what I do. That is my purpose. To exist just as I have before. To keep some meaningless spark of lucidity alive, as I sustain the object loaned to me while the candle that is my consciousness burns and melts. An ephemeral story. I bite into a sandwich knowing that soon my consciousness will end, and I will be sucked back into that perfect darkness. I will cease to exist. Bite by bite, and my body shrivels and withers away. Piece after piece of cold deli meat. This used to be a cow. This used to be alive. This cow has been made into an infinite number of cold sandwiches that I have eaten over and over and over. What will eat me?
What scares me the most? I don’t care if my life is meaningless. I don’t care if this insignificant copy of an endless cycle of mediocrity fades and is replaced. What scares me the most is the people I think I love. My friends and family, equally as insignificant held against the apathy of the stars, but who send ripples through my perception like waves. We sit, and we talk, and we listen to music, pretending that the end might not be so close. Sometimes we play music. Running in happy little circles from one end of our tiny world to the other, with all the freedom our little bodies could ask for.
The universe expands infinitely in all directions. Eventually, all particles will be too far apart to ever interact, drifting around aimlessly in nothingness. They will never touch again. There will be no rocks, no trees, no people, no love or freedom. No consciousness. But I feel her breathing softly next to me, steady heartbeats pumping oxygen between her heart and her head. In the face of apathy, in the face of the stars, in the face of God, I wonder if maybe, just maybe, I can forget that I am dying. As my body, and every other body of mine, is slowly being torn apart by a cosmic force, maybe I will be able to sleep too.