We always said that when everything else was gone, we would remain.
I think young love and naiveté go hand in hand; we cannot dream so big if we understand how small we are, in the vastness of everything. When everything else was gone, we said, but how could we have been expected to understand what that meant? The world wouldn’t die for a hundred million years; and even then, wouldn’t we already be drifting through the stars? The universe wouldn’t die for a hundred billion billion years, and even then, wouldn’t one big gasp just be the beginning of the next bang?
We had no idea how wrong we were.
It didn’t start with a whimper; nor with a bang. That’s a false dilemma. There were always a thousand ways for the world to crumble, and we only imagined a handful of them. Nuclear war, we thought. Alien invasion. Entropy. Time. In our minds either we were the agents of our own destruction, or else we died like inconsequential wisps of the greater whole.
False dilemma.
We would be destroyed, but not by our own hand; we were wisps of the greater whole, but never inconsequential. It wasn’t hubris that made us feel unique and impossible, but how could we not have imagined that the light we cast would never be noticed?
When everything else is gone. I suppose we weren’t as wrong as all that. We didn’t foresee the nature of our immortality, but here we are. Whispers and stories, devoured and subsumed into the new creation. Even bones have a place, and love can be quantified and distilled into power.
Everything else is gone, but we remain.
Photo and sculpture by Amy Fox. Amy is a writer, sculptor, painter, producer, actor, improvist, editor – and apparently she occasionally also sleeps. Check out The Switch, her latest project!