Stars

I am challenging myself to write a post every single day in May, to kickstart my writing again. I will be following some prompt words that I ‘stole’ from somebody on instagram. Here is my second post.

There were three stars, in a straight line. And they followed her wherever she went. Up North, down South. In the Eastern hemisphere, where the world was tropical and the heat and humidity battered her body until she oozed from every orifice. In the Western hemisphere where the days were icy and short and then terribly, terribly long. Every night, three stars in a row.

If she looked up at the sky her eyes searched and searched for three in a row, just like that.

She didn’t know what they were called, or if they were part of some larger constellation. Scrap that, who cares for the constellations.

As long as there were three stars just like that. Just that, as long as there were those stars. She didn’t know what came after that. Just that she had to see them.

When she learned about space it was always with awe. A deep expanse of blackness and nothing and airless floating, containing worlds of light and gas. Black holes bending time and space, folds of dimensions expanding and contracting. Complex and unnerving, terrifying and beautiful.

But when she looked up, all she could see were the stars. Her three stars, amid a myriad of others. Sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on where she was.

Dependable. From her safe haven on earth.

The Temporal Length of the Universe

Hello.

Today the sun is out. We were promised an Arctic Blast this week. The wind as it blows is icy, but my legs were warm as I pumped them in the sunshine this morning on my way to the Glass Library. I needed to get there quick, to make the most of the shorter opening hours for New Year’s Eve.

I forgot it was New Year’s Eve. It’s just like any other day to me. Nothing remarkably special. We are celebrating another revolution of our planet around the sun. The moon will carry on controlling the tides, the winds will carry on blowing across the marshes, cows will continue to graze, blinking their eyes lazily, unknowing.

The world doesn’t know that it is entering a ‘new year’. It just hurtles towards it, carrying on as it always does.

The only reason we celebrate it is because we have a meticulous time-keeping system. But I like to think that time doesn’t particularly care for our recording of it. It plunges ever on, nonchalant. It glances it through the window at the party, gives a little smirk, and on it rushes.

We, of course, in our own little planets of life, are oblivious. Putting our make-up on, combing our hair, showering, writing lists of resolutions because 2016 is IT. It is the year we take charge of our lives and lose weight (or gain it) and become successful entrepreneurs and become the perfect versions of ourselves because 2016 is a new ‘beginning’.

But it isn’t really. Time is older than any of us. Time is older than the universe. To Time, 2016 is another year to add on to the billions. Another weary revolution, another flash through someone’s life.

Time will continue to hurtle and plunge and soar and sail, growing ever faster as the years are packed on to our ages.

Those are my thoughts for today. I hope your day today is time-worthy. I hope mine is too!

Do You Ever Wonder?

Do you ever wonder why you are walking somewhere.

Watching the clouds scud by, or the rain bounce off leaves and splatter onto the ground, or the trees swooshing in symphony, wind rushing through their tops, transporting you to an entire new universe of sound, of hugeness, a feeling of being quite small against the forces of the world.

Sometimes it will be a vast Arabian desert flying past the dusty windows of a Chevy Suburban, patches of sparse, pale green scattered here and there, camels breaking the dead heaviness of the summer heat, their shadows stark and black against the vivid orange sand.

Sometimes it will be the blank wall beside your bed. You will notice the little holes left by the paint bubbles from the last hurried paint job. They look like the craters you see on drawings of the surface of the moon, only these are smooth, more refined. You might see ancient drawings, done in faint pencil, small bows and flowers and little anime figures. You may notice the paint bumps that always cover painted walls, and then as your eyes focus in and out of concentration, you will finally see the faces.

Shocked, your raging thoughts will fade for a while as you try to connect the funny shapes together, your fascination awakened as the details begin to emerge. Look, you think, a pretty girl. Oh no! Oh dear, it’s a deformed old man with a large nose. Now it’s a baby in a cradle, a man in tails with a crocodile face, a boy with crazy hair.. then your eyes start to wander and discover faces in everything else, the curtain patterns, the carpet, the folds in the quilt. Very soon, however, your interest wanes. You are weary of seeking out faces. Your thoughts, which were a faint, crackling background murmur, suddenly surge in volume, clamouring for your attention, grasping at your emotions.

You know, dearest reader, that you are an entire universe within another universe containing 7 billion other universes just like yours, but also very different from yours? You have your world, and your world looks just so, to you, and you walk about, meeting folk, thinking things, all the while assuming that your world is the same world as everybody else’s.

“Our world,” you say solemnly, a mug of steaming coffee in hand, “is in dire need of a makeover.” And you take a sip, your eyes watching your conversation partner as they respond.

You say ‘our world’ as though you see identical terrains.

They’re not, though, are they? Each and every one of us is seeing things through the screens of our own personal universes.