chaos spinning out your fingers, temperature rising.
microstates, snapshots of what
you could have been: possible choices.
the never ending catch-22 of “what if”
run circles around you.
alternate universes and lives you could have led,
decline into anguish or madness or both.
the universe tells you this
is how it’s supposed to go
that you must destroy yourself
at least once.
that you are meant to break and shatter and
slip into the crevices of this chaos,
effluence of disorder and unpredictability.
you were helpless against
the current that ruled all of space and time,
so you burned and you were fire—
star fire—
for a moment you were the jewel of the night sky
how you burned, bright and fleeting
and just then, chemistry could be a metaphor
philosophy more than reaction
and you were more than the universe’s experiment
more than molecules in disarray
more than careful concoction
something beyond a body as a balancing act.
it passed, momentary and temporary
too aware of your own mortality
too much heat and it consumed you
ran you to completion, ate you through.
stars always made to unmake themselves
at least once.
everywhere at the end of the universe
In so many words, it can be said like this:
stars are only infinity for as long as we remember that our own imagined infinities are not enough to even leave a footprint in the timeline of the universe.
stars have outlived us and will outlive us and though they seem close to godhood, they too will change and die.
and stars too, can be killed in the way that light gets eaten by black holes and black holes always start as stars.
and they are stars that got hungry, that got too big and still wanted. stars that were too human to stay as stars.
and we all know that humans are never meant to be everlasting. we shine bright and die quickly, not because we want to but because we are afraid of what we become if we do not.
too hungry for our own goods, we could not wish godhood upon anyone,
still puzzling over what makes gods and what makes monsters.
the death of a star is slow and agonizing and sometimes beautiful, one that claws its way to the surface and makes the end known. we die between barely witnessed blinks of the universe.
short lived. angry. too tired for all our brevity. a pulsing of eternity we never get to see.
we live intimately in grief the way that stars never will, though we all deal with ending in the same way.
head on and reaching forward, for an after. for what comes next.
for a humanity beyond the timeline of this earth. (this universe.)
