How to Master the Language of the Universe

If there’s one thing I learned in this life, it’s that you better not mess with the universe. If you piss it off, you’re bound to get slapped BIG TIME; I’m talking about a nasty slap that only an immense and endless universe like ours can carry out; a slap that tears the soul apart, dismantling it into millions of minuscule particles that scatter in outer space for all eternity, never fully returning home, to us. I should know—I excel at pissing the universe off.

I was thirteen when I made the universe angry for the first time. It was another late-summer Friday evening. We were sitting in Ronny’s balcony and playing Truth or Dare, “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys was playing in the background. The spinning bottle stopped in front of me. In a desperate attempt to avoid the necessity of revealing my deepest secrets to the other girls or embarrassing myself forever with a foolish dare, I pretended to see a UFO.

“Where? I can’t see it,” Noah called.

I pointed at a random point in the sky, and then I saw it—a real falling star! In complete panic, I rummaged through the pile of wishes that rested undisturbed in my subconscious, trying to decide which of them I should choose.

“You’re just making it up!” Yaeli said, completely breaking my concentration.

And so it happened, that instead of asking for the boy, with whom I was secretly in love, to finally know that I was alive and even love me back rather than ignoring me and acknowledging my existence only when he needed to copy my homework, I wasted my wish on a pair of purple Dr. Martins.

Several weeks later, I learned that shooting stars are meteors that burn once they penetrate the atmosphere, and then it hit me: the universe didn’t send me billion-year-old galactic dust just so I would make one stupid wish. No, it sent me its first message, not that I knew what it wanted me to do.

Time escaped from me, and I was already in my twenties. The universe kept on sending me complex messages, though: an earthquake right before my secret crush called me for the first time, a sudden downpour on a hot summer day, a rainbow that appeared after I lost my way in the desert, and unlikely coincidences. But I didn’t realize these were all signals due to language gaps; instead of learning the cosmic sign language in which the universe conversed with me, I chose to learn German and Spanish. As it turns out, languages that were invented by human beings are of no help when trying to understand the universe. If you can’t talk with the universe, you can’t talk with yourself, and if you can’t talk with yourself, you’re bound to make every mistake in the book and aggravate the universe beyond words.

Even today, after years of knowing one another, I don’t always manage to understand what it’s trying to tell me; just like the sparkle of the stars reaches us hundreds of light-years later, my comprehension also doesn’t bother showing up on time. Sometimes, when Mercury isn’t retrograding or another astrological/astronomic event I know nothing about happens, the sleeping butterflies in my stomach (yes, the same ones that confuse me immensely once awake), suddenly speak fluent Universic. When they feel like it, they serve as my interpreters and help me synchronize with the universe, even if for a few magical moments. When this happens, all the darkness within is washed away by light and the chaos somehow rearranges itself. The universe smiles its gloating smile at me and protects me from all the bad things—we are both together in this journey. But then the frequency goes bad and the abyss between me and him widens again—I go back being the small and lost Shira down here, and the universe goes back being huge and scary up there. Just like a protective parent, it doesn’t hold a grudge or gives up on me, though, sending me fresh encoded messages all over again, as if I hadn’t screwed up for the zillionth time.

I will never understand how the universe could be so forgiving, beholding from high above how I make more stupid decisions. Maybe it’s boring for it to be all alone, detached from the rest of us; maybe the universe wants us to disobey the rules every now and then; maybe it wants us to be rude, so it would have a good excuse to remind us of its existence, to remind us that although it seems that we are not part of it, we are nonetheless entwined: each little thing we do in life has a ripple effect, for better or worse. Who knows? I sure don’t. The only thing I know for sure is that I better master the language of the universe at one point to avoid making more mistakes. Until that happens, I know it will continue talking with me, waiting patiently for our language gaps to close, for once and for all.