Event Horizon

Recently I've been digging into my memory of college, a gravesite I haven't touched in a decade plus.

It was an all-women's college. Navigating the social world of it turned out sour, like a bad sourdough starter.

I don't remember much of it. But recently they've been coming back at 2AM, memories I thought I'd obliterated.

It is a kind of oblivion.

I've decided that girl wasn't me. But what if she's still trapped inside of me, screaming?

I've gotten into outer space recently. Black hole videos, specifically.

There's this thing with black holes called the event horizon. No light escapes it. We can't even see it. If something passes through it, we see it in space, suspended forever in our vision - but it already disappeared, an illusion. It is time bending.

One day, the universe will no longer be able to sustain itself. It will die out, like dreams, and just as unexplainable.

I don't even think my memories of college would make it into space dust.

The girl inside of me, the college version, has already passed through the event horizon. But when is she gone, can that moment please come?

Once a human being passes through the event horizon, they become particles. Every atom of their physical being separates. They are stretched thin, in a long line of their atoms, one after the other in one long string of them.

I like to think of the college version of myself passing through the black hole, after hovering over it. Disappearing but still visible to outside observers, billions of years later. She becomes only an illusion.

The second you pass the event horizon, you die. No one could survive it.

My memory of college is a black hole. Once I start thinking about it, ruminating on it, my memories instantly die, and become atoms that no longer make up a whole.

My memories disappear into something physicists can't even fathom.

If we only become atoms, the concept of us having "souls" and "memories" wasn't even real to begin with.

It has become my escape mechanism, to think of this.

I forgive myself in each atom, over and over again, like they are one long string of rosary beads. But I can't pray, not technically, because I'm no longer a person, I'm a concept, just like praying is a concept. God doesn't exist here, and no one is left to judge me.

I love that.

All that matters, in the end, is that I can be broken apart enough to finally not have to contain myself all at once.

In the end, my memories of college are atoms that disintegrate instantly somewhere inside our universe. Or maybe they have already disintegrated. There's no knowing.

My college memories are suspended forever in the space time continuum, gone even as they seem to exist - but they don't. They're already dead.

I think I can live with that. Maybe I already know that.

And that is what finally helps me fall back asleep at 2AM.