A Traveller in the Night Sky

There comes a point when, looking into the pitch-black night sky long enough, you realize that you’re staring into a boundless emptiness. It is a nothingness you cannot resist, just like the nothingness the cornered mouse sees in the cobra’s steady stare. It washes over you and engulfs you in the totality of its stillness. Your gaze is unfocused and directed upwards. Your defences slowly melt away, and let the infinite vacuum gently draw your consciousness out through your eye sockets, into the cold starry night. You are drawn, drawn upwards, drifting up and away from all that anchored you; from all that held you down and kept you safe, safe in your ignorance, safe from looking up.

Somehow, you always knew. You knew, but you forgot; you knew but you forgot that you’re a traveller; that you were born to be a traveller in the night sky. You realize it now, that it was your destiny to one day look up into infinity, and say to yourself in a language you alone understand, I will now set myself free.

You are drifting, drifting, no, propelling yourself, propelling yourself upward and onward, propelling yourself away from the prison of gravity and out into the cosmos. Your hands, your luminous, long beautiful hands, stretch forward, infinitely forward, and grab onto one of the stars. Then you pull yourself faster and faster until you pass it, and grab onto yet another star, and then another one and another one, until you erupt from the Milky Way into the infinitudes of the universe. Surrounding you, is a vastness and a stillness. You take a deep breath, inhaling it, and then another one, even deeper, filling your lungs with the universe. You spot a distant galaxy, and stretch an infinitely long arm towards it. Gently caressing it, you feel its cool creamy texture with the tips of your fingers. On a whim, you grab onto it. You pull on it as hard as you can, and whoosh yourself past it in a speed unimaginable.

Occasionally, clusters of stars and gas zoom past you and, reaching towards them with your arms, you swing around them, as if they were tree-branches in a cosmic rainforest. With each swing, you pick up more and more momentum, and nothing, nothing holds you back as you hurtle out of the universe, out of the cluster of celestial pebbles that has once exploded from a single point in space.

There are no more galaxies and clouds of dust and gas flying past you now, only the blackness; the deaf, blind blackness, and you stop sensing any motion. Gradually, you spin around to look behind you, and there you see an immense sphere of shimmering candles slowly receding in the distance. The sight is magnificent, divine, yet as the universe recedes and becomes smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter, it is less and less impressive. Finally, it turns into a flickering dot, and disappears altogether. As you keep on drifting in the cold emptiness, a question forms itself inside your head. Is that all there is?