When I first heard about the Big Bang, I thought, shit. That sounds bogus.
All the material in the universe combined in a single tiny speck and then it explodes and BANG! Entire cosmos? And it keeps expanding? And eventually it’s going to start contracting until we all cosmically implode?
Yeah, okay.
Except… except.
As humans, we start out as tiny specks. We’re cells that don’t even make a whole human. They make a half a human, and we’re two halves living inside two different bodies until those two bodies meet and mate and by fate make you.
As an embryo, when you’re first created, you’re smaller than the period at the end of a sentence. Like 54,000 times smaller. All of your molecular codes are contained in this teeny, tiny bit of space. And while you don’t explode in an instant, once you start growing, your self doesn’t stop expanding. You get bigger endlessly, physically pushing your mother’s uterus to bizarre proportions.
And then you’re born, thrust from a warm, cozy place where everything is provided for you, out into the world. Bang! Life expands from that minuscule space to an entire room. Bright lights! OTHER PEOPLE! What the fuck are those? Cuddles from mommy! Sounds! Milk! Blankets! Diapers! My god, what must it be like to experience shitting for the first time? None of us remembers.
After a few days, bang! More expansion as you leave the hospital and TRAVEL IN A MOVING VEHICLE to a home that’s not a uterus. Sleep in a bassinet. Explore laying in all manner of places - on the floor, countertops, tables, blankets, couches. Develop neck strength and get to look around, taking in the explosion of existence around you.
I mean, truly. Think of how, as a newborn, you’ve never seen anything. Heard anything. Felt anything. Every new sensory experience holds universes of possibility within it. You see colors. You feel textures. You hear orchestras.
And you can’t even experience food yet. That’s going to be months, almost a full year, before your taste buds get their first tastes of anything. Think about how beautifully mind blowing that is.
While firsts slow down over time and much of life becomes mundanely routine, truly the world does continue to expand. You meet new people. You experience new restaurants. You go to school. You learn how to read. You kick a ball. You join a sports team. Learn an instrument.
And while you may not appreciate new firsts with the same reverent awe you felt for new experiences as a baby, they are still like mini explosions. It’s sad that even our own miraculous expansion becomes routine and expected. Imagine if we treated each new experience throughout our lives with the awe of exceptional beauty that young children do. If every first - first use of a backpack, first time hearing a radio, first time eating your third flavor of ice cream - maintained that reverence, how special would life be?
But alas. A backpack is just a backpack. The radio isn’t as cool as the internet. Who cares about strawberry ice cream when you've already tried chocolate and vanilla?
Still, we’re expanding. Our big is still banging. Our universe grows. We get older. Have our first kiss. Learn to drive. Travel. Maybe we graduate. Get a job. Maybe we get married and have children. Our experience pushes us further outward.
But expansion cannot expand forever. Our infinity has some sort of finality. We reach, not the ultimate climax, but a turning point.
And our world starts to contract. Just a little.
Because we start to lose.
I felt this deeply at such a soul level recently. Driving home one night a few weeks ago, I was compelled to glance at my phone. The screen was aglow with a text message from a friend I don’t often hear from, and I immediately knew, without even reading the vague message, what it meant.
A mutual friend of ours had passed away.
*long pause - moment of silence, urging you to feel the gravity of losing a 37 year old, highly intelligent, with a whole lot of promise*
This realization brought a moment in my life when I felt time slow (the second or third, really), and I felt my life pivot. It turned. It shifted and will not be the same after this moment.
And my friends, this is where my life started to shrink back in on itself. Just a bit, and slowly.
Initially, with the fresh news of loss, I froze. Should I text people? Call people? Post something on Facebook? In this digital age, what is the appropriate way to spread such awful news (kind of an expansion) to a group of people from another, earlier part of my life?
Thank goodness another friend texted me, letting my personal world begin to rotate on its axis once again. Sharing your grief with others is essential for moving, maybe beginning to move back inwards.
Because moving inward is exactly what my world started to do at that moment. To make our loss sting more, we hadn’t found out about it until the evening of the day of my friend’s funeral. There were several of us who would have attended had we known about it, and our inability to do so layered guilt on grief.
And so my friend and I decided to call our own memorial service for our friends from high school. To give us a sense of closure nowhere near as grand as the sense of loss washing over us. To pay homage to a tortured life gone too soon.
I used the gravity of the situation to slingshot my mind backwards, zoom through a sky of memories, recollections of friends I hadn’t seen in years, decades in a few cases. Who would I need to invite back into my orbit?
It took some detective work I was awfully proud of. (Which is a VAST overstatement. I still had some cell numbers stored in my phone that turned out to be valid. The most digging I had to do was for a friend with a common name. Couldn’t find him on Facebook, but he popped up on Instagram due to some mutual friends. But what a feeling of satisfaction it was to find him after a 7 minute search!) There was immense joy in reaching out to people I hadn’t heard from in so long, people whose friendship is memorialized strongly in the foundation of my life, despite the overwhelming tragedy of the news I shared with them.
Two weeks later, my universe contracted slightly more when I not only saw words on a screen sent by old friends, but I saw their faces. Heard their voices. Hugged them. Met their spouses. Shared tears and memories and the strong warmth of old platonic love that we felt for each other once upon a time. Photo albums drew me further back and in, visual evidence of people I had even forgotten existed. I felt like I was living in a melodramatic TV show. You’ve all seen that episode where the high school friends who haven’t seen each other in a long time reconvene for someone’s funeral and lament on how long it’s been and that it shouldn’t have taken such a horrible event to bring them back together.
Why did such a morbid trope play out?
But because we’re not 20 somethings anymore, those of us who did go out afterwards opted for Starbucks rather than a bar. We sipped coffee and talked about our lives in greater detail, past and present. We promised it wouldn’t be another 20 years between visits.
You know, those of us who even made it to the gathering. Because some who said they’d try didn’t get there. And while that stung at first, I understood. Not everyone’s life was ready for the inward pivot. The past takes on a different weight for everyone, and even for those of us who do assign a large amount of gravitas to it, sometimes that heavy enticingly draws us back, and sometimes we have to shed that weighty load to move forward. It’s interesting to realize who the past pulls back and who it propels forward.
I’m still struggling greatly with this particular loss. It comes over me in waves, even six weeks after learning of it. Some days I go on like normal, not awarding any thoughts to my friend. And other times, I want his opinion on something or to invite him over for bad horror movies or a Dr. Who marathon or a round of Disney Villainous. I toasted to him on Thanksgiving; I’m struck by how he won’t experience Christmas this year. It’s heart wrenching; 37 is just too young to go.
Earlier this year, I lost a classmate of mine, someone I actually knew since we were about five. We weren’t close, but we probably should have been. We shared a lot of interests, and we shared a lot of good friends. She had a husband and a young child and the thought of her sudden finality is bone chillingly terrifying.
Losing these two people who were my age makes me want to hug everyone. Makes me want to sit at a table at Applebees sharing appetizers with old friends. Makes me want to tell everyone I’ve ever known who ever meant anything to me the extent to which my care extended.
The losses make me look back over my shoulder and survey the places I’ve come from and gone to, the people I’ve merely met and the ones I’ve known. Deeper than that, the ones I’ve loved.
I was tempted to write “it makes my universe a little smaller,” but despite the feeling of universal contraction, smaller doesn’t feel right. What it really makes it feel is more packed with family, both factual and found. More warm and cozy and full.
And unlike the Big Bang pivot, I'm not saying my universe is done expanding. I’m almost 100% sure I’m going to continue seeing new places, meeting new people, having new experiences. I’m going to let myself turn inwards now, but I will force expansion again in whatever amount of future is waiting for me.
So maybe our universes are less like a big bang and more like a pulse. Blood rushes out of and away from our hearts, blood huries back towards it. We expand, we experience, we enjoy - and then we bring that back home with us. Rinse. Repeat.
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