Samwise
09-21-2005, 08:02 AM
I was laying on her bed, trying to coerce her comatose kitten into helping me conquer the nearby laundry basket, when she playfully kicked me in the shin with her steel-toed boot.
"C'mere, I have something to show you.'
Her computer was a graying box filled with dust and probably chisled out of slate. The one remarkable thing about it was, it ran so slowly that if you stood close enough to it, the anomoly in the fabric of space-time would either make you younger or create a second "evil" twin bent on destruction, mayhem and the accruement of various "Precious Moments" hummel figurines all for sale at a nearby Yankee Dollar.
Fuck hummel.
http://www.gemini.edu/images/albums/Galaxies/GMOSNGC628.jpg
"Don't you think it's remarkable?"
"Yeah, I'm surpised this POS was able to handle that image."
"Oh shut up, will you?"
"Heh, sorry, what was it you wanted to show me?"
"That's the Milky Way Galaxy. Isn't it just... Wow..."
"No, it's not."
"What?"
"How the fuck can it be the Milky Way? How the fuck could we position a camera in order to frame that shot, anyway? It would take hundreds of millions of years for it to get that far out!"
"... Yeah, OK. So, it's the Jeff galaxy."
We made quite a pair, you see.
"Jeff? Who's this Jeff fellow?"
"The galaxy. Are you not listening to me?"
"No, where did you get the name 'Jeff' from?"
She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
"You're kidding me, right?"
"No, who is Jeff?"
"Jeff is Jeff. It's the first name I could think of."
"Oh, OK. So, what did you want to show me?"
She turned herself around in her chair and stared up at me, with the infamous "You can't be serious" look any boyfriend can recognize at sight.
"Alright. It's a nice galaxy."
"It is! It's fucking huge!"
"Yeah."
"It's nearly one hundred thousand light-years from side to side. It's sixteen thousand light-years thick in the middle, but where we are, it's approximately three-thousand lightyears. Set to scale, that means the solar system is approximately one-sixteenth the WIDTH of one human hair! The scale... The sheer magnitude..."
Whenever she discovered something amazing, she would freeze up and start muttering, marveling at the way the cosmos worked. Several times, our chemistry teacher called the nurse, thinking she had gone into shock. Everyone was sure that she was destined for NASA or the FBI or one of those alphabet soups that consume unholy amounts of our money for reasons we aren't allowed to know. Which is why she's now working the graveyard shift at a Price Chopper an hour from where she was born.
I rubbed her shoulders and tried to get her to focus.
"The entire human history, the advancements we've made in space travel, the universe makes a mockery of what we have worked to achieve! Our pride and bravado... Totally unfounded! We're so vastly out-gunned... Not even a toddler yet! It's amazing!"
She wasn't running on much sleep, something had been keeping her up the past few nights.
"It's amazing! Earth... It's even smaller than an atom's nucleus! Continents, they're... Can you even comprehend how tiny that is? Smaller than a quark! And yet... And yet...."
She sunk back into deep thought. Honestly I hadn't a clue what she was talking about, but the moral of the story was slowly forming in my own mind.
"And yet, here we are."
She spun around and looked up at me.
"Despite the vast hugeness of the universe, the galaxy, hell, even Chester, here we are, together. That when the Big Bang shot it's biological lode against the cosmos, the variables should come together just so as to cause life to spring up on Earth, which, as far as we know, is a phenominon unique, in all of Creation, to this tiny planet. And after a millenia or more of evolution, everything should come together just perfectly enough so that two unnasuming people in a po-dunk town in Vermont should happen to get along, the sheer odds of it are just insane. We're a mathematical impossibility, babe. It's times like this that I give that whole 'God' notion another thought."
Then it hit me.
"Is that it? You want me to start going back to church?"
"It's not me, it's my family. They're uncomfortable around you."
There's a lot of backstory to that, save to say that her entire family are Reborn Christians. The Gun-Toting Fag-Killing Abortion-Clinic-Bombing Flag-hugging Mexican-Deporting Iraq-Invading variety.
"But what about you? Do you want me to go back to church?"
"Honestly, I don't care. How you reconcile the improbabilities of your own existence is your own business. But my parents have told me that I'm not allowed to see you until you're baptised again."
Now here's the killer part. It would be very easy for me to go through the steps of pretending to be Christian, but religion is one of those weird things that I'm not quite sure on. I would very much like to have had her family think of me as a fine upstanding church-going fellow, but I'm not really sure if faking faith in God would have been the way to do it.
"I don't care what they think. What do you want me to do?"
Have you ever met someone where you were able to tell what the person was thinking without them saying anything? I haven't, but this next moment made me second-guess that. She got up, and headed over to her dresser drawer, where she kept things she didn't want her parents to see. She pulled out a bundle of notes lovingly scrawled in bright blue ink, and placed them in my hands. I left without saying goodbye.
Two weeks ago, I found the bundle, and read through each one of them. I took them out to the kitchen sink, and, ever so slowly, lit them on fire. I watched as the yellowed paper turned a bright orange, sending off an undulating tail of smoke which gathered around the ceiling, like an ominous cloud. I waited until it turned into white ash before turning on the tap and letting it all flow away.
"Forever" wasn't quite as long as I had hoped
I'll be back in a few days.
"C'mere, I have something to show you.'
Her computer was a graying box filled with dust and probably chisled out of slate. The one remarkable thing about it was, it ran so slowly that if you stood close enough to it, the anomoly in the fabric of space-time would either make you younger or create a second "evil" twin bent on destruction, mayhem and the accruement of various "Precious Moments" hummel figurines all for sale at a nearby Yankee Dollar.
Fuck hummel.
http://www.gemini.edu/images/albums/Galaxies/GMOSNGC628.jpg
"Don't you think it's remarkable?"
"Yeah, I'm surpised this POS was able to handle that image."
"Oh shut up, will you?"
"Heh, sorry, what was it you wanted to show me?"
"That's the Milky Way Galaxy. Isn't it just... Wow..."
"No, it's not."
"What?"
"How the fuck can it be the Milky Way? How the fuck could we position a camera in order to frame that shot, anyway? It would take hundreds of millions of years for it to get that far out!"
"... Yeah, OK. So, it's the Jeff galaxy."
We made quite a pair, you see.
"Jeff? Who's this Jeff fellow?"
"The galaxy. Are you not listening to me?"
"No, where did you get the name 'Jeff' from?"
She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
"You're kidding me, right?"
"No, who is Jeff?"
"Jeff is Jeff. It's the first name I could think of."
"Oh, OK. So, what did you want to show me?"
She turned herself around in her chair and stared up at me, with the infamous "You can't be serious" look any boyfriend can recognize at sight.
"Alright. It's a nice galaxy."
"It is! It's fucking huge!"
"Yeah."
"It's nearly one hundred thousand light-years from side to side. It's sixteen thousand light-years thick in the middle, but where we are, it's approximately three-thousand lightyears. Set to scale, that means the solar system is approximately one-sixteenth the WIDTH of one human hair! The scale... The sheer magnitude..."
Whenever she discovered something amazing, she would freeze up and start muttering, marveling at the way the cosmos worked. Several times, our chemistry teacher called the nurse, thinking she had gone into shock. Everyone was sure that she was destined for NASA or the FBI or one of those alphabet soups that consume unholy amounts of our money for reasons we aren't allowed to know. Which is why she's now working the graveyard shift at a Price Chopper an hour from where she was born.
I rubbed her shoulders and tried to get her to focus.
"The entire human history, the advancements we've made in space travel, the universe makes a mockery of what we have worked to achieve! Our pride and bravado... Totally unfounded! We're so vastly out-gunned... Not even a toddler yet! It's amazing!"
She wasn't running on much sleep, something had been keeping her up the past few nights.
"It's amazing! Earth... It's even smaller than an atom's nucleus! Continents, they're... Can you even comprehend how tiny that is? Smaller than a quark! And yet... And yet...."
She sunk back into deep thought. Honestly I hadn't a clue what she was talking about, but the moral of the story was slowly forming in my own mind.
"And yet, here we are."
She spun around and looked up at me.
"Despite the vast hugeness of the universe, the galaxy, hell, even Chester, here we are, together. That when the Big Bang shot it's biological lode against the cosmos, the variables should come together just so as to cause life to spring up on Earth, which, as far as we know, is a phenominon unique, in all of Creation, to this tiny planet. And after a millenia or more of evolution, everything should come together just perfectly enough so that two unnasuming people in a po-dunk town in Vermont should happen to get along, the sheer odds of it are just insane. We're a mathematical impossibility, babe. It's times like this that I give that whole 'God' notion another thought."
Then it hit me.
"Is that it? You want me to start going back to church?"
"It's not me, it's my family. They're uncomfortable around you."
There's a lot of backstory to that, save to say that her entire family are Reborn Christians. The Gun-Toting Fag-Killing Abortion-Clinic-Bombing Flag-hugging Mexican-Deporting Iraq-Invading variety.
"But what about you? Do you want me to go back to church?"
"Honestly, I don't care. How you reconcile the improbabilities of your own existence is your own business. But my parents have told me that I'm not allowed to see you until you're baptised again."
Now here's the killer part. It would be very easy for me to go through the steps of pretending to be Christian, but religion is one of those weird things that I'm not quite sure on. I would very much like to have had her family think of me as a fine upstanding church-going fellow, but I'm not really sure if faking faith in God would have been the way to do it.
"I don't care what they think. What do you want me to do?"
Have you ever met someone where you were able to tell what the person was thinking without them saying anything? I haven't, but this next moment made me second-guess that. She got up, and headed over to her dresser drawer, where she kept things she didn't want her parents to see. She pulled out a bundle of notes lovingly scrawled in bright blue ink, and placed them in my hands. I left without saying goodbye.
Two weeks ago, I found the bundle, and read through each one of them. I took them out to the kitchen sink, and, ever so slowly, lit them on fire. I watched as the yellowed paper turned a bright orange, sending off an undulating tail of smoke which gathered around the ceiling, like an ominous cloud. I waited until it turned into white ash before turning on the tap and letting it all flow away.
"Forever" wasn't quite as long as I had hoped
I'll be back in a few days.