Did The Earth Move?

Excerpt from An Existential Crisis of Time

But the stars are high, and they were here before, and his birth was nearby, and a human life is 100 years; that’s only 5 or 6 of his present life, and he has a rushing and dragging sensation as he looks up at the deep curvature of space – he’s falling into loss, into myopic, zoomed-out loss, as he pictures the ruler of time as a small interval on a larger ruler, and the ruler becomes a fence made out of rulers, and the fence becomes a road, paved with galaxies of time, and his 15 years become 15 microns, and he loses her. He loses her, and these people at the party, and his school, and his tests, his suburb, and his grandmothers 80th birthday, happening tomorrow. Tomorrow always, tomorrow flowing by, and he is drowning in a river that has no water and remembers nothing. He’s 80, and he’s 8, and he's 18, all at once. He’s also dead, has always been dead, and life feels like an idiopathic blink that has been the dream of no-one, following no awakening. He remembers, he remembers the nightmares of big and small, the sands and the mountains, and all of it feels hopeless, as the sensation of decades fall away into the giant abyss of always, and the heat death of the universe, and the death of whatever it outside of the universe. And suddenly, the childhood promise made between he and his mother that they will be in heaven together, and that they will go together, and that they will always be together, snaps. It snaps like a bolt coming loose from a bridge overhanging an infinite canyon, and he falls into nothing.

And she is smiling at him in the backyard, and he knows that she is outside of time, but that he is not, and that her body will age, and that their memories which will be formed in the coming months and eras following the tests - those will be forgotten, and the ocean will still be there, and it will weep no tears for them.