Elijah Kesh Rosales ||

The Universe is a pretty vast place. With the gazillion colossal stars and planets that it holds and the seemingly infinite void that is outer space, it almost seems like it could go on and on and on forever, or so I used to believe. It’s funny because, for the past eight months or so I have completely proved modern science wrong, my universe wasn’t at all vast, it wasn’t infinite, nor did it contain large planets and stars made of big gasses and huge rocks. For the past eight months, my universe was a mere 160 square meters filled with itty bitty planets and stars made of wood, cotton, polyester, and a minuscule population of four. 

I have known this universe all my life. From the day I took my first breath, until the very moment I am writing this here, even until the instance that you, the reader, are reading this now. But for the first time in my life, I was bound to this one universe alone. Gone were the days where I traveled through wormholes to get to other Universes, to frolic in the asteroid fields of the vast worlds that surround my own. I was stuck, like an astronaut without a working rocket ship, a dwarf star bound by the gravity of unknown forces outside its meager power. For all the time I have spent bound to it, I surely have come up with many theories about its several mysteries and unknowable enigmas that surround it, but they were only theories, just theories. However, despite the great wall that those mysteries have built and the ginormous hurdle that is the little brain cells I had left, I, in all my glory, have come to a eureka! moment. For the first time in history, I have discovered one true indisputable fact about the universe.  

This is how it happened, the first few days of being stuck were surreal. With vacation coming in faster than your local Foodpanda order, whatever requirements I had left were swept like sandcastles demolished by the gaping mouth of the ocean waves. Every day was a party of one, watching series after series of whatever to entertain my eyeballs, playing game after computer game until my arms gave out. “Ah, this was bliss!”, I said to myself as I’d spend 70% of my time confined to the small but ever so comfy bedroom galaxy and only occasionally making my way to the Kitchen sector to get my fill of sustenance. I was engrossed in doing all sorts of fun, living life like a carnival ride. Life was pretty great. 

That… didn’t last long. At this point, I didn’t even know how long I spent my days doing nothing but that. Days turned to weeks and weeks turned into months. The pages of the calendar seemed to tear and fly so fast. I was staring at the abyss that is my computer monitor when something didn’t feel right, a chill hits my spine as I felt something horrifying lingering in the background, unseen, unknown, unnoticed for God knows how long. That’s when it started though, pretty much when I finally knew, that “woohoo!” eureka! moment, except it, wasn’t really “woohoo!”. My mind was so preoccupied with being hypnotized by the different screens always in front of me that I have completely ignored what happened around me, almost as if I was trying on purpose. What once looked like a small and humble paradise now looked like a prison cell painted haphazardly to look like a getaway resort. The paint peeled off as it revealed the stench of miserableness and suffering, always there, hidden by the corners of the eye chosen to be blind to.

It dawned on me, however, I was nothing but a dwarf star in a universe on the brink of implosion. Chaos reigned as the nebulas shouted and screamed at each other with emotions so complex only God would ever know. The planets shook, moved, and danced to the rage music of the bite-sized heavenly bodies that were around it. Among all of the noise of the heavens was but I, the feeble dwarf star, sitting in silence in the solace of the bedroom galaxy burning an ever so beautiful red – a stark contrast to the usual blue that the Nebulas and astronomers would usually adore and observe. I close my eyes and see the darkness, the cold shivering loneliness one could only ever feel when truly alone, with the nearest stars billions of lightyears away, and escape only to be the frightening blaze of a supernova. I open my eyes and look.  I observed around me for the first time I did in a while. The walls have come closer now, moving ever so slowly, only a millimeter a day. Small enough to not notice then, but big enough to be quite observable. The universe quickly went from what was already small but cozy to an insanely suffocating chamber of sad loneliness. This was it, for the first time in history, I, have regrettably discovered one true yet depressingly indisputable fact about the universe. 

The universe is rapidly shrinking and I couldn’t do anything about it.