Issue 35.4

by Rae Merson

Into Infinity

I don’t know if you felt it, but there was a rise of existential dread this summer.

Centrally located in the first state, trepidation washed upon the blacktop of my neighborhood. I had such high hopes for the warm season: a promising internship and new love lined up for me. Opportunities which my previous nihilism never thought possible — opportunities which I quickly discovered were not always that ideal.

As the days marched on, the wave of dread crept closer.

It was a wave I rode shortly before I reached out to my doctor, who finally decided that having endless rebounds of major depressive disorder was enough for me to qualify for the little check next to the box labeled “chronic.” I got a new pill to take, a new disorder to add to my growing collection. It was one that I had sworn I would outrun, but there’s my luck I suppose.

I remember adding that pill to the others. There were so many now. I am always fluctuating between how many little capsules must go in my system. Seven. Fourteen. Two.

God, I remember when it was just two.

But that pill was the crash. It was the foam on the shore that would lead me to recovery and solid land. The wave itself, with its roaring waters and treacherous peaks, was a murky abyss I had to first traverse through.

Every night that summer, even when work was there waiting for me the next day, I would spend hours watching nonsense. Movies, TV shows, documentaries — endless static to distract my torturous mind, to fill myself with affection and thoughts that I craved from another. I saturated my brain with countless ways to make my body numb, to not have to comprehend what was going on in my life.

Work was fine. In fact, it was delightful. It was having to look at myself in the mirror. Having to look at what I allowed myself to become. Allowed myself to decay into.

Send another picture.

My phone would buzz near constantly. I hated him, but I loved him too. He was the first person I had let back into my life in such an intimate way after I had vowed to keep all harm away from myself. My body was a temple, or so I was told, and I thought he understood that. I thought that after all I had shared, he would keep me safe.
 

Let me see you.
 

I hated it all. I hated that I let myself think that this was the only thing I deserved. That without him, without his version of love, I would be destitute. His words suspended me into a void of liminality, simultaneously thrust between his current torment and the haunting wounds of past. Past hands — past faces — past voices. I wanted to crawl out of my skin, let it soak in cleansing waters and air dry in the backyard. But no matter how many times I rinsed and rinsed, I would never be clean enough to wear myself again.

Flashes of the past would ebb into my mind, their constant reminders of what mistakes I made or what actions I should have taken crawling around my mind. They were maggots at a rancid feast eating upon my sanity, forcing me to reflect on how I got to where I was.

I often silenced my phone when it got to be too much.

Locked away in my room, projector aimed at the ceiling, I would lose hours in my isolation chamber. The near constant cycle of self-loathing and gorging myself on static ended up with me watching space documentaries.

Space and time. Time and space.

At first, I was horrified with how small I was compared to everything. How it confirmed that I didn’t matter. How everything just… continued and was the same yet ever changing and…

…and I eventually discovered that with Infinity there were infinite possibilities of Me — and in that infinite void was where I could finally choose.

I saw, by watching those shapes and colors swirling above me, that the state of human beings is so much more than what we think we are. We’ve advanced to see the universe and understand what we are on a particle level. We can see the limits of creation itself. We can fit incomprehensible waves of data into little discs we could swallow. Worlds of information, trapped in nothing larger than the tip of our pinky. We can tap into a different wave of dimension and put music and color and sound though it. We can transform and be transformed. We are ever changing and ever being changed.

If we could do all that, what was stopping me from doing the same?

Something erupted within me, a supernova of years of pent-up anger. Reserves of heat that had built up in the nucleus of my being. For the first time in my life, a boiling point of rage on my own behalf had been reached. Much like a star’s own birth, a rejuvenated version of myself had been born.

The core was ecstatic to get to work, constantly bursting with energy and desire to step forward into the emerging light that was me. But the shadows that remained of my past, the terrors that continued to plague my system, needed addressing.

He needed addressing.

I knew I had the power to undo the ties that bound us together. A separation of particles that were never meant to be together severed with a firm ‘no’ that I had never known I could use. A hard conversation. A block. A motivation sparked by a cosmic metamorphosis.

Matter cannot be created nor destroyed — it can only be changed.

My matter — my very being — was in a state of change. Some points had already begun their transformations, morphing from mere dust to stars that hung around me. No longer mites that bit my ankles, but rather lessons learned and refined into new irreversible aspects of my soul. The projections of others that I once saw as permanent, disfiguring scars were now the very constellations that painted my essence.

But the present — the current wave that felt never ending — was starting to become a tangible project to me. Effort into myself, into preserving my body and life and presence was no longer some daunting mission only the universe could handle. If we could be anything, then so could I.

Life was not over, certainly not when it could continuously change itself in such magnificent ways. Out there, beyond even our conceptions, lays the opportunity for infinity. And in there, projected onto my bedroom ceiling I saw not only into that infinity:

I saw hope.