stardustcboy's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dissolution of Eternity i guess, on days like this, or even at times like this, i'm more aware of the slow decay of all things. i feel it more deeply, like the last exhalation before death slowed out to countless trillions of years. i close my eyes and find comfort in it. i see things dissolve away...bonds between people...love...friendship...cultures...all at the whim of the eternal erosion of time. time. the imperceptible ebbing away of matter and energy. the long unraveling of space after a cataclysmic event beyond understanding and perception of my mere mortal mind. i merely watch. a seemingly insignificant observer of but a millionth of a second in the eye of the cosmos. yet it is a lifetime for me... i see in my minds eye the unwinding of the clock. the sun rises and falls in loving dance with the moon and the stars in the heavens. days pass...weeks...months...years...decades... cities shift and change, boundaries expand and shrink, people are born, people die, lovers embrace so too do they fade, friends laugh so too do they mourn. it keeps going...onward... my life ends. replaced by the lives of my children, and my childrens children, and their children after. always the same but always different. in the end the greatest of equalizers, death, comes for them and all posterity... forward... decades turn to centuries...my life and the lives of those i knew, the lives of my descendants...all pass in the long march of years...expanding outward into millenia... forward... the towers of man crumble to dust...thousands upon thousands of years pass...continents move, mountains crumble, seas dry up, oceans shift... forward... ages come and go...billions of years in the seeming blink of an eye. the face of the earth is different. the sun ages, turns deep crimson, swallows mercury and venus, burns away the once blue skies that myself and mankind once marveled at...the same air the dinosaurs and all other life on earth shared evaporated into the infinite and uncaring void of space...scorched rock...pocked and cratered...like the face of an old man who spent his youth toiling in the sun... forward... trillions of years, the crimson sun has awakened life on mars. its heat melting the ice caps, it's gravity pulling the long sleeping crust of our nearest neighbor, life might begin to thrive in some form or another... forward... hundreds of thousands of trillions of years our nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, collides with our own Milky Way galaxy. a profound merging of matter and energy...clouds of cosmic dust and plasma...planet-sized interstellar debris...suns collapsing...exploding... forward... the aftermath takes countless trillions of years more. new planets formed, new suns, a whole new galaxy. mankind, even our solar system, is long forgotten and long gone. new worlds beneath distant suns...new stars, new moons...new life to marvel their mystery... forward... the universe has expanded even further now...outwards into the yawning void of eternity. things are colder. the space between matter has grown. more galaxies have collided. more time has stretched out... forward... it is an unknowable number of years now. uncountable within the span of a trillion lifetimes of the human civilization. stars are nothing but faint and dying points of blue light in the vast and unforgivingly cold expanse of universal nothingness. one by one they wink out of existence. from hundreds of trillions, to a few billion, to less than a million, to a thousand, to only one...then... all time ceases to exist. everything becomes so cold and so empty that matter and energy can no longer exist. no matter, no energy, no movement, no time. just the endless void. the space that has always been and will be forever... it is in that far-flung future emptiness that i find peace. it is an emptiness that preceded time and outlived time. it is eternity. it is something because it is nothing. zero, a non-entity, a cypher. untouchable and unknowable. reverse... everything goes backward from that darkness. the temperature rises slowly, matter and energy return. thus motion, inertia, and time. distances shrink...suns wink back to life... reverse... galaxies untangle themselves, planets reform, orbits undecay, distances shrink... reverse... faster and faster all of eternity rebuilds itself again...from nothing to something...matter recoalesces into form. life resurrects itself on a countless number of worlds... reverse... the sun shrinks from red to yellow. earth's atmosphere returns...the loving familiarity of the beautiful blue sky i've known all my life. days pass backward. the continents shift back to familiar shapes. ruins rise up to monolithic towers. forests rise from ash. seas swell from dust... reverse... the bustle of mankind returns, my far-off descendants rewind themselves through their lives, through one another, the stories reverse, backward... to me. and my words stop. i sit looking at the monitor as each character appears, made of pixels, pinpoints of light and energy. i am at peace. the sorrow, the weight of the world, is lessened a bit. suddenly every little detail is clearer. the chirping of the crickets outside. the drone of the airconditioner. the faint hum of the freeway. the movement of my neighbors...and beyond all that the slow exhalation of the universe. the imperceptible flow of time from the beginning to the end. every atom in my body feels it... i feel ancient beyond my years sometimes...old...weary... yet all is as it should be. ~B-) 11:47 p.m. - 2005-08-22 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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