“We never have authentic experiences anymore.” That’s one thing Sora said. Man, I wish I remembered more from that night. I wish I remembered every second.
All the cuts and scratches on my forearms have healed. From the tree. From that night. I kept peeling off the last scab so it would never go away. So I’d never be done with her. Is that wrong?
Finally, I just put a bandage over them. Our body wants to heal. Why can’t that be true for our mind?
I was still in High School when I saw the clip of Paster Cannon ascending. No one believed it authentic. How could we?
It was Ben who shared the link with me, but I didn’t watch it right away. I didn’t know why he’d show me one of those big, outdoor, thousand people, mega-church Easter services.
“Pastor Cannon Ascends,” it was titled. It looked like a normal Easter Sunday sermon. But this link wasn’t posted by the church or capped from the official stream. This was from someone in the crowd. Someone who, I don’t know, thought they’d go home and watch the sermon again? Needed to record it because everything in our life needs to be recorded? Like we’re all Ken Burns?
Who watches all these things we film? Like at concerts? Why would you view the concert through your tiny camera lens instead of just experiencing it live? I just don’t get it.
But this guy, who maybe trades bootleg sermons like it was a Catholic Dead show, was filming the stage only he saw a rainbow in the sky. So his auteur sensibilities have him pan up to capture the ambiance of the day. His shaky camera work is still pointed at the clouds when you can very clearly see a streak across the screen.
That was the moment Pastor Cannon vanished. The crowd didn’t see it. There was confusion and questions. Everyone thought it was part of the service. Like some performative lesson they didn’t understand, a metaphor they had to answer on a test. Only, Paster Cannon never returned to the stage.
The Earth is spinning at nearly 1,000 miles per hour. If the Earth suddenly stopped everything on the earth would still be moving at 1,000 miles per hour, which is three times Earth’s exit velocity. Imagine you’re riding on the hood of a car racing down the interstate. If the car suddenly brakes, you’re not going to brake with the car. You’ll be propelled forward at the speed the car was driving.
We never really think about how the Earth moves. They tried to explain this in physics class, but it’s so abstract a concept. I can never wrap my mind around it. And since our movement through the universe is at a constant speed we don’t even notice us moving, but the Earth is trucking. Not only is it spinning at a 1,000 miles per hour, but it’s also zipping around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour to be able to make it all the way around in a year’s time.
Oh, but there’s more. Our whole solar system is spinning around the Milky Way Galaxy at 500,000 miles per hour, and don’t forget the Milky Way Galaxy itself is expanding out into the universe at 1.3 million miles per hour.
All in all, it’s estimated, as I just sit here in my dorm room, that I’m actually moving through the universe at a speed of approximately 2,000,000 miles an hour. It kinda makes me dizzy to think about it. It as if we’re riding on the hood of a car that’s speeding down an interstate, which is sliding down a mountain.
And the only thing keeping our feet where we place them on the ground of this one tiny planet in the middle of billions of stars and space is the law of gravity.
And now gravity is failing us.
I have never felt so alone in the universe.
I need to shut it all down tonight because I can feel my depression spiraling like I’m at the event horizon of a black hole. (Which coincidently, scientists now believe is at the center of the Milky Way. So there’s that.).
But before I go I want to leave you, my trusty empty void which I’m desperately shouting into, with one more disquieting thought for the night… which is…
…If the infinite universe is expanding at the insane rate of hundreds of millions of miles per second… What exactly is the universe expanding into? How can something infinite also be getting bigger?
There you are. Now neither of us will get to sleep. 😉