In the middle of a rant about the unfathomable beauty of deep space, hesitation formed in the back of my throat from the simple fact that I will never be able to completely comprehend this passion. Its origins are the sum of seeing stars for the first time when my family moved outside city limits, listening to a lot of David Bowie music in high school, and the hollowing silence of my childhood bedroom at night. Yet, honestly, it all comes down to the fear of never understanding my own mind as well as humanity pretends to know our place in this universe. Every time I look up at the expanse of “empty space” above my head I feel like I’m trying to remember something that was never there to be remembered.
Some of my best conversations have been with the moon. Mostly one-sided, of course, but that does not mean they weren’t informed and full of insight. A majority of them have ended up as poems somewhere in the dusty corners of my creative writing files, a study of my overwhelming worry of living a mundane life. Yet, this past summer I was engaged by a force so intimidating that had the moon grown lips and actually talked back to me for once it would have felt like another uneventful Wednesday.
Living in a small college town during the summer teaches an impactful lesson on the type of emptiness a place can withhold. That morning was a bullet point during that lesson, I could count the number of people I had seen on campus on one finger. I had just left the library and was walking towards the parking lot where I was going to wait for a friend to pick me up to see a movie or something; the details have become hazy due to what happened next.
There have been a number of moments in my life when my body has felt microscopic, something I have always associated with the fear of death. In less than a second my body was nothing more than an indistinguishable speck on a slightly bigger speck called Earth. As I walked towards the parking lot, more of a thought than an action, I felt smaller than ever before and felt a vibration go through the entirety of existence as I understand it. I understood this plucking of string theory, simply humming out the sound of the word “hey.”
I don’t pretend to understand what happened that morning. Much like my fascination for deep space, my personal encounter with the universe will always feel like an amalgamation of listening to “Space Oddity” too many times and misfiring neurons. But I can’t deny that I felt some form of recognition. It’s at this point in the hagiographic film about my life where my character would become deeply involved with understanding where that vibration came from. It would have a standard montage of my character going through stacks and stacks of books in a library, meditating and suddenly getting an idea after falling asleep on a pile of notes. In reality all I’m doing is writing this article and filing the story away in my mind as one of those weird stories to tell at parties. Unless the universe wants to talk at me again, it knows where to find me.
