Ethan's Story 1

It’s closing in. I can see them, I guess, and I can hope that they are there, I think, but I am still sitting, watching and not really knowing what happens around me. I think they started closing in last summer. Or when I was born. Or when Jesus was born. Or when the universe began, if it ever did actually begin (that’s another story for another day). I am sitting here on the surface of the earth. The sun rotates and goes somewhere that none can pinpoint and we, all humans, follow it, hope that it leads us somewhere, but it may not. It may lead us into a black hole, which is of course nothing. Or it may lead us to an alternate universe in which the earth’s magnetic poles switch and the north is the south, south is north, people are plants and amebas dominate life.

So here I sit, people wandering around me, lives ticking and records spinning. You are not here, and I am not here either, really. Yet we are all here and all not here- does that make us real or nonexistent? Satisfying ourselves with blank checks written to knowledge, we cannot ever know because we simply are not what is meant to do the knowing. So sit with me, let’s think forever and never find an answer. We can think until our brains rot, or two billion years from now, but if the human race was meant to know, we would have known by now. So we just have to wait until we evolve and maybe that species will know. Or the next. Or maybe Earth itself was never meant to produce a knower and we just live for fun, an experiment of what a world with no purpose would end up as.

We are darn near the end, so let us find what we have become. Assigning meaning where there is none, that’s a given. Making rules where rules aren’t needed is yet another. Doing things that need not be done, yes that too. Wonderful things, though, like appreciation of nature and development of the brain as a tool to express itself to the masses, to share happiness, whatever that happiness may be. For even Marilyn Manson is happy- happy with being discontent.

Yet we still aim higher, trying to break through the diamond ceiling. There is no way to break it, though, unless there was another force in the existences that could break it for us. Then I guess we would become knowers.

I’m sitting here with people bumping my crossed legs as they pass me. I don’t know where they are going, nor do I need to know because they can’t see me. They can’t see who I am, at least. I can’t see them. I can see the sky. It is night so the clouds are a dark yellow and the earth moves slightly to the right of Orion- further than it was yesterday night at least. The clouds are yellow and the stars shimmer grey, the way chrome glows when it is wet. As the earth hurls towards the sky and the chrome gets bigger and the yellow gets darker, the people start to notice me sitting in the street; cars stop and go around me and birds fly over to me and dogs scamper up to me, their owners tugging at the leashes “Come back, Chloe, don’t touch it.”

The earth is hurling through the yellow clouds now and the chrome stars are growing. They look mystical, like little orbs that are begging to hover around you the way humming birds hover over flowers. Come closer, orbs, warm us with your light buzzing; hold us up so we don’t fall into abyss.

So the stars do just that. The earth stops rushing and the people stop noticing me and the stars still get closer, but not bigger. The addendum would scare me, but I can’t be scared because earth has hardened me and made me like a diamond that cannot be crushed. The orbs can carry me if they want, though. Carry me, if you want.

Up and down and up, the stars have pulled me into the deep and dark yellow dust. Around, around, the earth moves quickly now and the stars are showing me its life. Honestly, stars, I can’t see a thing, the earth moves to quickly and the clouds are too thick, show me another place I can lay my head.

If there was life to see me, I would be a sight to see. A million stars carry me through time and space so that I cannot see the place I was or where or when I am going. I feel more relaxed than the suns and the moons; somehow, I know I am safe. Somehow, I know that I am going to a book where everything has already happened, I just get to live it as if it were in the present. The author says “The stars glistened in their own light and they illuminated their path with the glow of inner peace. Across the sky, if you looked out far enough, you could just make out the end. Some might call it a forest of rest in which all the creatures reflected those in her own mind- the ones familiar to Planet Earth. Others claimed that it was more of a white cloud that made everyone who touched it eternally happy. Still more believe it to be a hole in space where one could peruse one’s memories and the memories of others like a magazine collection. The stars knew it to be none of these, but also all of these. The stars call it Ibid, so she too calls it Ibid…”