The Words - An Autobiography

Fifteen Billion

I was approximately half the universe's age since it was supposedly already fifteen billion years old when I was born. It had been thirteen billion, then been revised like so much else had. But what's a few billion years? It was the same as the assumption that Earth would still be around, a few billion years longer than it had been. And the indisputable insistence that it was impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, which we had been regularly, without much thought to its impossibility.

Meanwhile, they couldn't get the name of a dinosaur right or decide whether Pluto was a planet. I'd never trusted a single one of these dogmatic assertions. So, I didn't 'know' the universe's age, and 'I don't know' had long been my mantra. I was curious. I wanted to see, feel, smell and taste everything possible. I wanted to experience every bit of the universe, to sip every drop of the nectar of life. But I didn't 'know.'

Fifteen-Billion years, give or take, before my birth:

Again, stipulating the timeline, according to the revised theory of my youth, there was a big bang, the explosion of a single, infinitely dense ball of matter without dimension but containing all that would forever comprise the universe. Never more. Never less.

I agreed that the universe, as I knew it, continued to expand at an accelerating rate, and if I did the math, which I had, the timeline continued to work out, or close enough. Whether the Big Bang had the force for that expansion to continue forever, as those who'd assumed they'd known all there was to know had insisted, I'd questioned since my youth. I was never a big believer in the infinite or forever. Even after my wife gave me 'forever' and I'd lived fifteen billion years, I remained a skeptic. I had difficulty accepting that the universe had the force to escape its gravity. Given all the original theoretical constraints, that math did not work out.

Assuming it to be a closed system, as the theory proposed, that no additional energy or mass was gained or lost, no more or less than there'd been in the beginning, and that the same laws of physics applied as were explained to me when I was still a schoolboy, the expansion would eventually begin to slow until it finally stopped. Then it would all begin to collapse until it inevitably crashed together again with enough force to instantly explode and expand outward, the perfect perpetual motion machine. I called my theory the Big Bang and Big Suck. I envisioned everything there was or would ever be as an iterative sequence of huge gasping breaths. Or was there some form of inertia that would eventually take its breath away? Or was it the lack of inertia that would allow its infinite expansion? I don't know.

Fifteen-Billion years since my birth:

I had not seen Mary in what seemed forever, even to me at the time. I'd been searching, exploring every part of the universe, desperate to find her. I was the one who'd gotten lost. I felt more stupid than afraid when I realized I wasn't sure where I was, and I'd somehow lost sight of Mary. I was more concerned for her than myself. I knew she would be searching for me as frantically as I was for her.

Wherever the idea originated that there was a silver thread while astral projecting to follow back to your physical body, I wasn't sure, only that I'd never observed such a thing. I navigated from one reference point to another. I located my last point of reference, then from there, the one before that. It was like navigating through the woods. There were trees, all of which looked pretty much the same, and I needed to find identifying features to tell them apart.

I much preferred that my reference points were in direct sight of one another. But, when we crossed large expanses of empty space, that was nearly impossible. Even the pinpoints of the nearest galaxies grew too faint to see. Or there hadn't been enough time for that light to reach wherever I'd traveled since I agreed that light could never travel faster than the speed of itself. Regardless, we never traveled those long distances alone, so if we were ever lost, we'd have one another and be lost together. We'd find our way back home eventually. Or we wouldn't, but we wouldn't be alone.

By then, having searched the entire universe without luck, I concluded we must be chasing one another around in circles and somehow kept missing one another. I couldn't contemplate the possibility that she'd crossed paths with another giant salamander or suffered another such fate. I needed to find her.

We'd discovered long before that we could expand our ethereal selves as large as we liked and found no apparent limit to this ability. I decided to put that to the test. Mary had to be somewhere within the universe, so I would expand until I filled it all if necessary, which I did, and still didn't find her. Now, desperate and afraid, I pushed harder, assuming I hadn't worked my way into every little niche.

The Gift:

Not able to find Mary, there'd been no gifts. Just anxiety. Worst Birthday Ever!