heat death.

I cry on the couch while Mike Rowe teaches me about Heat Death.

I sit compressed, elbows to knees [head, shoulders, knees, and toes], and I stare at the TV screen, a mess of light and sound and orchestrals that some Discovery Channel creative in 2012 thought sounded like the sun. Sounded like melting universe. Photons hitting plasma hitting ice hitting rock hitting star hitting everything and nothing and repeating [in case you missed it the first time].

My eyes only take in color – information presented and reflected and sucked dry [Do Black Holes Exist?, season 6; episode 2]. Water pools over my event horizon and I can’t stop it spilling. I can’t stop me spinning. I know there’s nothing at the bottom but [repeat repeat repeat].

I’m running after my cousin across the driveway.

Blistered feet. Hot tar.

Minivan with New York plates in the turnaround.

He and his parents are leaving soon, back to Rochester.

I want to go with them. I want to see what is theirs

after sharing what is mine for a week.

I want to know if their garden is like our garden;

if they have a pool, a deck, two floors or one or three;

if they have a basement;

if they have bats in the eaves.

The last time I cried like this, my body felt like it would burst.

Starting with the eyes, welling up, hold it in, too much to take pop. Next the lungs, fluids already accumulating, harder and harder to breathe but still, you’ve got to breathe, right? Who doesn’t breathe? But then, suddenly, one breath too deep and pop pop.

It’s the heart, next, all the stress, like water itself, like a river, like the ocean, like whale fall – you feel yourself sinking and the sadness of it all is too much to take and

pop

The brain is last. Still collecting information. Still taking in rough shapes of the world. Still hearing and seeing [you never needed eyes to see, not really]. But really it’s just still thinking, because that’s all that’s left. That’s all you are. Something that thinks. About nothing and everything and all the little gray spaces between. About how hot it is outside and how cold you are inside, blanket. Sweatshirt. Socks. About how the fridge is empty and you’re glad because the thought of food makes what’s left of your insides churn. How if you just keep drinking water something in you will be righted, if only to make you composed of one thing, just liquid, a naiad, a seal skin without its selkie [isn’t that romantic?].

I want to know if the summer is the same summer

at their house. If the sun shines

in the same way, with the same heat, if it blinds

like it does here

with the kind of light that shows you

the universe on the backs of your eyelids –

stars conjured by stars in the blackness of your mind’s eye.

I want to know if they have as many Daddy Longlegs

as we do, here in the woods.

There’s one now –

my foot comes down to squash it.

A reflex.

A learned thing.

A nothing at all.

pop

“The birth of the universe was over in a flash. But the death of our universe will take almost forever,” Mike Rowe says. I’ve only watched him on two shows: How the Universe Works and Dirty Jobs. There’s something poetic about this duality. Something comforting in the idea that the man I watched tar the rigging on the Star of India when I was eleven and who taught me what restoration meant can be the same man who tells me how the universe might end. Whether or not he’s right, whether or not we know, we contain multitudes. All of us. Everything.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” my cousin says.

He is several years older than me.

Everything he says is true.

I am learning something in this moment.

Something I’m not sure I want to learn.

“Why?” All I can say.

“When you kill one, it’ll rain,” he says

with a sad shake of his head.

Long after they drive away, I watch the sky.

I wait for rain.

I let myself cry. For the first time in a long time I allow myself this. To sit. To not know why. To not think about why. To just do it and accept that it’s happening. That it’s necessary. I let myself feel the heat of blood in my face, track the tears in their paths down my cheeks. To feel the effort of my lungs and the tap of my fingers on my knee. I drown out the sound of the universe, my ears a roar, no orchestrals suited to this. Not even this. I let myself collapse.

And in my collapse, I’ll get up. I’ll re-expand.

And the universe will start again.

That night, the rain comes.