One day, deceased facebook pages will litter the internet, not of those who have died tragically young, but of those who lived out their entire lives and died peacefully. These memorials to their souls will be archived, along with the twitter accounts whose owners have tweeted their last tweet. Computers will pile up in a metal grave, melted into scraps and reused again, just as bodies will be put into the earth to nourish the soil, or be lost as dust in a gust of wind. The color in your cheeks and sharp wit will be preserved in photos, videos, blog postings, hundreds of thousands of text messages and emails. You and I will have left our mark on humanity, not by doing something monumental, as we wished, but as another of the million voices who has left their imprint in obscure posts online, next to images of cats in costumes and recipes, which will be studied by coming generations to understand our culture. Each flippant comment we post is a snapshot of our lives, as surely as an actual photo, preserving our mindset at one individual time, preserving us for as long as the internet exists, more permanently than a lusty carving in a tree.
Yet when we look into the sky, we realize the futility of our desires, for the universe is vaster than we could ever explore. We live on a small planet in a nondescript solar system in a spiraling galaxy amongst billions of other galaxies. When you take my hand, while lying on our backs in a starry field, we are the smallest of all, unable to stop the rotation of the earth or the pressures of gravity. Once the planet is swallowed by the heavy red sun, the universe will be no different than it was before; even the greatest king will not the remembered by cold and dark space. Our lives are so miniscule, yet I want to lie here with you until eternity, undying, greedy for a larger snatch of life and joy than I was assigned, even though I know that every second that goes by is a second lost.
We are both in college, studying to get high-paying jobs so that we might live together happily, so why does it feel like my heart is being wrenched out of my chest every second I am away from you? Why can I not lie here with my head on your chest, drawing patterns on your stomach, these next four years instead? We are of no interest to the universe. We were forgotten the day we were born, and each day we are growing older.
Gender:
Points: 1062
Reviews: 2