Panorama

weight & volume

She walked on the paved concrete toward the gated school. Forced footsteps made their way to the hallway entrance. The smell of stale windex and pubescent teenagers filled her nose. No one notices the cold wind that rustles irrelevant debris. It's normal to feel the chill run up the spine, even with the layers of clothing. Thick, colorful scarves dance around the room as chatter bursts here and there. That's all they were to her, the simple clothing that they wore: the space they would take. How unimportant and similar they all seemed

Her ear buds pulse with adroit guitar riffs and melodious voices. It helps block out the clamor of everyone else. She scoffs at these others that she calls classmates, they communicate in harsh and bitter language. In their eyes, she was nothing, but that was okay for her. She was always aware of this certain loneliness in consequence of her unimportance. She didn't want to be apart of their world, though. In the term of her second year she finally awoke to what was really going on. She is surrounded by sanctioned indoctrination that she could no longer associate with. Undeclared social laws bounded her to the world, and she didn't like that. There was a proper way to dress, act, eat, communicate but she never adopted those lessons. Instead she would just listen to her music.

Without notability, she walks over to the outside courtyard where more teens reside before the bell. Clouds converge in the sky painting all light with somber grey granite. There she finds an empty bench with scrawled black letters of past authors. She likes to run her hand along the letters and often finds herself curious: what if she wrote something? She always found herself tongue tied however, flustered on what exactly to write.

"We all evolved form something" it said.

Something under the hurried text was a response.

"The Big Bang"

She opened up her science book to chapter one. She was hesitant to read on, for she was trusting some scrawl for a sense of purpose. Her heart beat pulsed only by the pounding of her music. Then, as if by fate, the singer voiced a hymn she was too familiar with.

"Just seize the moment"

She read on.

The beauty of physics is that it allows for energy and matter to be created from absolutely nothing. That's what we once were, absolutely nothing."

The word 'nothing' seemed to linger in the weightlessness around her.

This is essential to the learning process of our origins of our universe. Then there in the midst of absolutely nothing there was a minuscule, compared to the giants of our galaxy, sphere of exponential energy. A violent explosion occurred, infinitely expanding time and space itself. In a millionth of a millionth of a second blistering energy scattered everywhere and anywhere. In the hot cloud like atmosphere energy hit each other in incredible speeds sparking lights of opalescent and unknown wavelengths. These clouds cooled, taking over 830,000 years to do so, and began to shift from uncontained energy to subatomic particles. Energy essentially turned into matter. Consequently the creation of anti-matter was existent. These particles, unrestrained by any means, eradicated particles into nothingness. Just imagine, a dense battle field of subatomic particles, that lasted billions of years. What you see today are only the mere leftovers of our starred clustered galaxies.

If we all evolved form something, then how could we evolve from nothing? Her languid eyes turned pearl with agonizing longing. How could nothing turn into something. It wasn't just merely a something, it was larger than life - the very definition of it.

She thought back to the kids in the courtyard who laughed clangorously to irritating notions of conventionality. They knew nothing of their origins. The genesis of where it all began. She closed her book satisfied that she is the keeper the universe's secret. She seemed like nothing now, with her classmates ignoring attitudes, but one day she would be with the stars. She would dance among the cosmic phenomena, the ever expanding canvas arrayed star dust. People would look up and only wonder how she got so far.

She transformed that day from nothing into a sphere of pearlescent energy. Her ambition increased in the knowledge of the very reality of it all. Akin to the big bang, her aspirations forcefully filled her grace and essence of her curiosity.

The lyrics of her song continue as her heart has rekindled a new fire within it. Nothing seemed as it once was. Everyone seemed as they were only with a new keen silver light.

"Turn your back on everything

banging heads of prophecy

lavish in uncertainty

and just seize the moment"

She grabs a sharpie marker to leave her mark on the lonely bench. She begins to inscribe lines that become the new soundtrack to her life

I'm here,

I take up space,

I matter.