Space...

space. the nothingness that separates bodies which, without it, would crash into one another in cataclysmic collisions of colossal proportions. whirling and wheeling through distances unfathomable the stars and their planets do their best to fill up space and yet in spite of their inconceivable numbers - numbers which make "all the grains of sand on all the beaches in all the world" seem the stuff of nursery school - in spite of these numbers with more zeros than the mind can comprehend; there is still vastly, endlessly, unimaginably more "nothing" out there than "something". and so it should be the easiest and most natural of things to accept. space. like the image of the ocean being a desert with the "perfect disguise up above", space appears impartial. space presents itself as the "open and unbiased environment" in which one makes decisions more logically and more free of undue influence. and yet space for me is death. because the influence of my gravity is all that i have to hold those things near to me which i hope to keep near to me. "please - remove yourself a ways from me. let me have my space. let me feel what i feel without the pull of your tides and the heat of your solar flares. allow me to pursue my own wheeling progression across this vast and trackless emptiness so that i may know which way is truly mine". 4:07. "TRAIN!" the track which runs behind your house is 72 blocks from mine. four and one half miles. space. yet still it wakes me. i fear that it will forever wake me. and if i can hear one train from four and one half miles away and it takes away ALL my space so i can scarcely breathe, then am i destined to live somewhere where train tracks never approach each other by fewer than ten or fifteen or twenty miles? and if so, then are there not places where i can never go? so where is my space? where can i be where there is no you in my head, wheeling and sparking and stirring up cosmos of emotion within me. is there such a place in this puny and compressed universe for me? space does not afford "room" to make a decision. space IS a decision. turn down the fire of my passion so that i may listen to reason? can reason fashion a galaxy? consider the coalescent fusion of random gases and intergalactic emotion-dust, collapsing on itself - boiling, compressing, focusing, compacting into something at first just hinting of solid, then scorching, melting, fusing and compressing into another kind of super- dense matter so ungodly heavy that it generates gravity - so much gravity that even light, that fleetest of escapists, is pulled back, clawing against the fabric of nothing, into that all-encompassing vortex - tell me my love: does this process lend itself to a pensive respite? can the light be "excused for just a moment" as the hurtling locomotive of new creation pounds into itself and becomes impossibly dense and incomprehensibly tensed? perhaps there is one portion of one time, so small we have no name for it, during which this force comes to "rest". and then... ...and then there comes a coming apart that has no adequate description in our poor language. "big bang." indeed. big-ass bang. hold on to your celestial butt, my friend, cause you're gonna see some serious shit. "bursting" falls short. "detonation" is the stuff of fireworks - a new year's eve pop-favor to krakatoa or hiroshima. and still we're magnitudes immeasurably and incomprehensibly short of description. searing, time-wrenching, universe-deforming expansion. all-y, all-y in's out free! everything that is not nothing leaves place and time in a heaven-bent journey to new. stars are born. red giants, blue dwarfs, quarks and quasars. photons and electrons performing their own microcosmic imitations of the monster model which they mimic and create. new gods are born. planets congeal and fuse and find their places around the nearest stars, their own offspring making moon faces at their parents; recalcitrant yet bound to spin under the influence of the gravity of love. held loosely in place by the most natural force in this newest of universes. and yet even while organizing and structuring and orbiting and rotating in what appear to be patterns of perfection, the truest reality is that it is all, forever (to us), inexorably, and accelerating-ly expanding. the ever-reaching ripple seeking the non-existent edge of the pool. of course this pool has no edge.  somehow it folds back into itself in a way that disrespects and confuses the ordinary human concepts of time and space, and that which appears to be forever is just the expansion phase of a pulsing too eternally large and mind-numbingly slow to be perceived as any except that which ever was and will be. shall i give you space? shall i hurtle away like captain stormfield racing the meteorite to heaven? can i reach a speed that will make it possible for you to escape my gravity and the natural condition of orbit? ask me to do that which my heart least desires and i will prove to you that i do not even yet fully know my own heart by complying. joseph heller would be proud: the very force which begs me to whirl and spin through time and the emptiness of space with  you, locked in orbiting rhythms of comfort and tides and seasons - one face always turned toward the other in geo-synchronicity - will be that which is also the only force able to defy itself. streaking away at light speed and yet still somehow able to "look" back i will watch as the illusion of space presents itself for what it really is: the fading of one gravitational force which must, inexorably, be replaced by another. hastening against hope, helplessly hurtling, i will watch the distant supernova as your star inevitably finds that other pull and accelerates away from me, combining forces with another under the ruse of "freedom of influence" which is really only the removal of one in favor of another. and i will shut down and coast at the speed of light. no longer able to see that which was my particular sun, no longer able to even perceive speed without the influence of your gravity. endlessly, soundlessly hurtling through nothing, slipping into darkness impenetrable. waiting. waiting. waiting for the imperceptible turn of the cosmic tide which will one day, one millennium, one eon hint that time has come again, the hands on the clock of the timeless universe do indeed move. and one day, one millennium, one eon i will be headed back to that which provides no more escape than the other  provided destination. i look forward to that day. at least i think it is forward. for here there are no stars. there are no planets. there are no tides and most certainly there are no seasons. (and for that matter there is only the whisper of a hint of time). i feel, therefore i am. my pain is my best proof that i still live. but it provides little enough reason. best that my parts, my cells, my molecules and my atoms, my electrons and protons and neurons and god-knows-whatever-else become as the matter of some expanding universe until they can one day, one millennium, one eon become again something new, some far, far, place "else". here's hoping my memory is of the same "stuff". i once (which was forever) loved you. goodbye.     back