End of the World

Date: 3/6/2020

Something weird was going on. Everyone knew it but no one knew exactly what was happening. Somehow we all knew something was coming, something cosmic. My best friend and I were outside like everyone else just watching, waiting. We sat on the concrete steps of a large corporate building, the sun shrouded by whispy clouds. It was around 5pm maybe. People were all around us. No one knew what we were doing or waiting for, but we all knew we were waiting for something to happen. We were calm though, there wasn’t any panic around us, there was an odd sense of peace within the anticipation. That is at least, until the sky began to rapidly change colors from behind the clouds. They were a normal and somewhat dull grey and soft yellow from the sun behind it. As people casually talked to the others around them, all of a sudden the sky shifted to purples, blues and pinks, as if the sun had grown five times brighter behind the clouds in just a few moments. Everyone around us now had eyes on the sky. What was happening? The clouds slowly broke away to reveal a slightly shocking view of the starry night sky, but within it was still our sun. Brighter than all the stars but still much smaller than usual. We could all look directly at it. It didn’t have its stark brightness blinding you as usual. It was pale, pulsing, soft. Everyone looked at the sky in awe. What did this mean? How was this happening? We all knew but we didn’t. Like a far off dream you think you remember but the details are fuzzy. Suddenly but for what felt like the longest minutes of my life, the sun receded into its self and turned into a pit of black. Only the dim lights of other stars and whatever fluorescents were around us showed the way in those brief but never ending moments. It was then that we all collectively knew.....the sun was dying, and so were we. As we looked around to the people we loved, as we looked to the sky, every person was fully aware, fully alive, scrambling with our most human emotions to figure out what exactly it is we should do. My best friend and I, still sitting on the steps watching this unfold, laid back slightly so we weren’t laying down but not sitting up. We calmly but while buzzing with energy, watched as the blackness that was once the sun started to burst again with light. It looked like slow motion sparks at first, slowly growing larger but looking nothing at all like the sun we had always known. We were all wondering how long it would take. Would it hurt? As our collective minds united in this other worldly chasm of thought, the mind racing ended nearly as quickly as it began. A wave of intense energy, so intense the brain can hardly fathom it, raced toward us like a strong wind. My best friend and I managed to hold hands just before the world around us began to dematerialize. There was no screaming, there was no time to run or be really afraid or panic. Everyone in the world knew we were about to die and we all accepted it. Like dying this way was the most natural way possible. We could let go of all our pain and the craziness of our individual lives. The moments between the sun going black and exploding before us, the moments before we were all shredded apart molecule by molecule, only took roughly thirty seconds. It felt like hours, it felt like the longest moments of my life waiting to die by the sun. So when it finally happened, the consciousness of every individual merged into one, launched into an infinite nothing. Not blackness, nothing. There was nothing in the universe. There was no universe, there was nothing. But just as quickly as everything ended, again it so began. Like a trickle of memory, the consciousness slowly began to reassemble like a child in the womb. Injecting its self back into the nothingness, reinserting it’s self into being. Swirls of metaphysical color began to form, molecules were being brought into being. The elements of something just as massive as the dying of our universe was beginning to form. All the energy, never lost, never created, was itching again to break out from the nothing that had enclosed it. Like a shot of lightning, all the energy of the cosmos burst forth in hot intensity. Flying across the nothing and filling it once again with its light. We were nothing and everything. We were an unseen eye, witnessing the death and birth of the universe. Not as a human, not separated from the source. We were the source. We were the life and the death. We were all of the heat and all of the absence of it. It was the end of that world we once knew it, and the beginning of others. We were star dust.