man explodes
Ripped from limb to limb, they say.
(No, that's not what they say. They say ripped limb from limb - subtly different, but all the same.)
(?Right)
You start. You've got an endpoint. You've got a vision, and you've got a time.
Those are our coordinates, in this big damn coordination.
And then...out. Like a light, if you buy into that. We don't always get to fade.
The universe ain't gonna be patient to you if you're not patient with it.
So you got ripped to damn pieces, things so much smaller than pieces, things that can't even be called pieces because they're not there anymore.
(.But once upon a time, they were)
There's your destination. There's your accomplishment.
Grand. Grand. So grand.
There it goes. Right out of the socket.
Out of that unique place of connection.
See, that's the only place a limb can ever go.
Because your body's supposed to fit all nice together. Because it can't function any other way.
It's not easy, you know. But you sure made it look it.
You set the whole damn thing spinning. That was your moment. Just like that.
(Impossible, to dock. And no, not even necessary.)
Ours didn't come so easy. We watched the clock tick, chose our instant in time, and it fought like hell.
(You started the clock, and we stopped it. Ain't that a little bit of cruel?)
No, no...it wasn't as ugly as your moment. I will say that.
.I didn't see you hit your head. I didn't see you slide sideways. I didn't see the cease of your lips to move)
.No one did
(.Of all the things I could choose to go back in some imaginary infinite interdimensional singularity and watch, that wouldn't be one
Would've been easy to wait, too. Oh, you could argue, and I know you would, now that your cat's out, about how many years you spent on that planet, knowing it'd never let you live outside of that damn pod, about how you were just about all out of patience, but didn't you learn anything?
You're out in space, man. Didn't you learn anything?
Maybe you didn't live. So I guess you didn't - couldn't - learn anything much about being alive.
You probably learned the most you'd ever done in that split second before you flushed. And not because of trying to hold on tighter, to survive for innate procreation instinct, none of that.
Because you saw it. Because that was your moment, with the universe itself.
Doesn't make it any less disgusting, though.
What happened to your blood?
Your organs?
It makes you sick thinking about it.
Where's all that go, in space?
Guess it's all the same, in the end.
That system, unfathomably wide, matter growing at an alarming rate when it first starts out and then decaying at an alarming rate once it's started (good god, life's rough, dying's all the time, you're always going there, you were always dead, but don't ever let it be said that you were never alive), well, it's what's here.
It's matter. I would say it's life, but that would be shortchanging our nuance, here.
It's matter, and it's energy. It's a lotta little things bound together, and you can arrange things real carefully whenever you like but it doesn't really matter so much if someone messes up your tchotchkes sitting on the coffee table taking up space where I'd be putting my feet up otherwise, now does it?
Not so much. Not in comparison.
It's all relative.
Nothing that's of much consequence at all, what I'm saying. Let's go back to the airlock, huh?
The airlock. Where nothing's ever supposed to happen.
I mean not ever, not never.
People aren't supposed to die in the airlock - you know that, right?
People aren't supposed to die on spaceships, and they're not supposed to kill each other, either.
(Come to think of it, why can they kill people down on the rotating rocks, huh? Let's make it the same rule, and call it square.)
They're supposed to be perfect. Icons of human ingenuity. Calculated, but in a fun way, like engineers now that we've stopped calling them "nerds".
What I'm saying is...what I'm saying, is.
We matter. You know? "I matter, you matter" and funny t-shirts and whatever else - blame it on the nerds. We get it. We're all composed of...particles.
The universe is a system. The human body is a system. When we leave those little places we love so much, so so much, we're entering pathways that, realistically, have always existed.
It's not about the fact that we're making them, it's about the fact that we're traveling them, because what happens when you don't make?
When you're just normal. When you don't have some grand, divine purpose, embossed and emboldened in burgundys and golds, saying stop everything you're doing, everything you ever did, everything you're ever gonna do, and listen to ME--
And people listen?
You know that feeling?
.You know that feeling
I know you do.
So what?
What if you can't have that?
What if you've gotta be your own ingenuity?
What if you're just making good promises with yourself?
You're the universe, near as I can see. It all loops back, in its own way.
Someone very wise once described to me the things people who've gotten just a little too sauced up on their own egos do as having a "distilled tincture of imbalance" about them. But you...this...
You're crazy, man.
You were crazy.
And then you exploded.
No, you didn't just die.
So if you're gonna sacrifice us all, because it has to be you, because you can't get along, because you can't just try to believe what it is you're shilling...
I won't forgive you, and I will forget you.
Not even my choice. But I will.
You know, I think it's stupid too. Pointless, maybe. I think someone somewhere is, anyway. But it's what we got.