I want to become a great astronomer someday. I really do. Maybe even explore space, to see things that have defied time, which I am skeptical to believe exists. I know that sounds silly, and childish (elementary school ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’, anyone?) but I want so much to know how it feels to look at everything, all at once. To see every relative, friend, pet, transportation device, city, sculpture, every great work of art, every oak tree, every gravestone of every celebrated explorer, general, scientist, painter, poet, king, queen, pacifist, anarchist, tyrant, villain and hero coexisting peacefully on one small dot that may well not even exist if you are looking at it from far enough away. I want to map out new constellations and see Red Giants explode and new stars manifest themselves in the distance. I find it beautiful but terrifying, that everything that is born must die out eventually. And how that we are all born from stars, that everybody you will ever pass on the street and meet and fall in love with originated from the beginning of the universe along with you. And how when we look up into the sky, we are seeing so many other kinds of life, but how we are also seeing ourselves, the reflection of our existence, in different stages of living, our children, our great, great grandparents, how we can trace the history of all history at one single moment in time if we desired it. How the sky is a visualization of how far the birth of life has come, and how far it has to go.
A meteor just passed by.
-Alice