Written August 5, 2018

And to think that yesterday he knew nothing.

His usually wandering eyes gazed emotionlessly down at the deep brown liquid. Though the mug in which this liquid was contained was quite hot, his hands cradled it indifferently. 

So, so strange was reality and truth.

He had led a standard life. Standard, that is, for what the word was worth. He supposed that in his case it meant that he had a job, a wife, and two children. He lived in a two story house, and was, for the most part, happy. “For the most part” was all that mattered in a world that was in so much turmoil.

Yes, he thought, turmoil. 

Now he said it aloud. The sound rolled off his tongue and drifted away, gradually dissolving into the stagnant air around him. 

He was in the kitchen. Usually, the smell of coffee and the slight, lingering scent left by the meal cooked the night before calmed him. But this was not a usual day. Or it was, and it was he that wasn’t his usual self.

Just then, his wife entered the kitchen behind him. She wore a pretty summer dress that suited her elegant figure and accentuated her cheerful stride that always gave him the impression she was not walking, but floating towards her destination. She kissed him lightly on the cheek.

“Alright, honey. I’m just going to take the kids to school and head to work. Don’t forget, I’m going out tonight with Susan and Jack. You’re sure you don’t want to come? Jack was really looking forward to seeing you.”

“No, no,” he heard himself say. “I have a lot of work to catch up on tonight. Plus, I’m not feeling up for a whole dinner ordeal. You have fun. I’ll pick up the kids.”

She smiled. “Ok. If you insist.” She kissed him again and called the children. 

The little girl of eight years placed her arms around his neck and gave him a wet kiss of her own.

“Bye, daddy.”

“Bye, sweets,” he replied.

The boy of fourteen, a book in hand, followed. “See you, dad.”

Finally, the man’s family left the house and the car hummed out of the driveway. He was alone. His eyes had followed the car as it left, and they now glanced down at the coffee cup. It was empty. He did not remember drinking it.

Abruptly, the man swung his head back and screamed so that all the cosmos could hear. 

“Why me?!”

He did not scream this out of anger, nor did he scream it out of joy. No, it was more out of a confused, mixed melancholy. He sincerely meant the question. He sincerely wanted an answer. 

He would have been content to accept that what he experienced the night before had simply been a dream. But something in his subconscious forced him to accept it for what it truly was. Profound. 

He could argue with himself, of course. He could say that it really was a dream. Dreams, as anybody who had ever had them knew, could be very strange. Sometimes so strange that when one woke from it, they hoped they were not going mad. 

This could have been the man’s case. But as much as he wished it to be, it was not.

What he experienced the night before was much too vivid. 

Dreams were supposed to drift into existence and then slowly evaporate, until all that one was left with was a vague haze of a knowledge that it occurred at all.

It could not have been more different than a dream. Every detail of it remained obdurately within him. It replayed incessantly in his mind.

A revelation! That was what it was. That is, that was how it could be described within the restrictions of the English language. But even this left questions still to be answered. Was it a revelation? Perhaps not, for he doubted that it was his mind that had created it. In fact, he knew that it was most definitely not created. It was no lie. It was real.

For the lack of a better term, though, he would call it a revelation.

He allowed it to flood him. 

It was as if his mind had built a wall against it. The black waters rumbled and roared in the world beyond, and the wall slowly lost its rigidity and gave way. 

First a crack appeared, allowing a small, concentrated jet of water to gush through. The water was quick to find a weakness and soon summoned all the strength it could muster to break free. The crack grew, until finally the wall exploded, willing the water to envelop the contents it had been so fiercely protecting.

The man closed his eyes and felt it wash over him.

• • •

There was nothing. No, not nothing. That would have been something. This was less than nothing. It was a vacuum.

The man felt that he was there, but not in a human, physical form. Only as the essence of himself. 

He felt he was very alone, there in the vacuum.

If he was in a position to say that much time had passed while he was the essence of himself, he would. But in the vacuum, time did not exist. Time was, after all, a figment of our imagination.

Soon, however, the lonely span ended, and he felt an abrupt invasion of an enormous presence. 

This presence made him think of the physics classes he taught, and how he showed his students computer-created diagrams of the Earth with a gravitational net beneath it. It seemed that this net strained under the Earth’s weight. 

After he showed his students this diagram, he showed them another with the moon added. The moon looked as if it was being sucked into the Earth, just as the man felt now with the looming presence before him.

He was drawn towards it. Rapidly. 

Then, as if he had been thrown against a solid concrete wall, he felt. 

He felt everything.

In the span of what he would have called a millisecond, he was in a tiny village in Africa that could have fit on the tip of the fingernail on his index finger. 

The people were starving, their stomachs bloated.

He felt the pain of the parents of the starving children, watching their young sons and daughters dying from a merciless and unstoppable force.

In another part of the world––Norway––a mother was giving birth. He felt the pain, but then felt the extraordinary happiness when the mother took the baby in her arms and cried tears of joy. He cried with her, and had the wonderful and unexplainable realization that she had made the life that was in her arms that moment.

Then he was in New York City. He saw an old man with his family surrounding him. The old man was dying. He felt Death. He felt it slowly weigh down on his eyes until the eyes shut, never to open again.

He was still in New York, this time in Central Park. He saw two teenagers, a boy and a girl. And he felt the love between them. He felt the first kiss that dimmed the senses and made one feel as if the Earth orbited only around them. In that moment he knew the world was right and would be forever.

Oh, how he was wrong. 

He felt war. He heard the deafening explosions of bombs and the burn of shrapnel and debris on his skin. And the screams! Just as unbearable as the bombs. They were screams of tortured souls, of pure agony. And for what? It was all useless, for there would always be another war, and there would always be other deaths.

He felt millions more. He felt them in rapid succession, as if they were rain and he was a rock slowly being eroded.

He felt all of the joy and wonder, hope and prosperity, sadness and anguish, greed and darkness of the entire planet in one striking moment, lying there the night before.

• • •

His eyes opened. Slowly.

A droplet of sweat trickled down his forehead from his hairline, making its way to his chin. He inhaled deeply.

He heard his phone ping on the other side of the room.

Heavily, he lifted himself out of the chair and walked, dragging his feet on the floor, towards the kitchen counter on which his phone was charging.

He had received a text that was from a colleague asking where he was. He had forgotten to call in sick. 

It doesn’t matter. I’ll explain tomorrow.

He went to the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of orange juice.

As a physics teacher, he thought he knew just how small he was when compared to the entire cosmos. How small everybodywas. But what he felt that fateful night contradicted everything that he thought he knew, everything he thought that he was sure of.

All of the passion and confidence he had in his knowledge, all of the classes he ever taught, everything he ever learned, suddenly became obsolete and minuscule in the jeering face of the universe.

I didn’t realize just how big the cosmos was. I thought I had a purpose. I thought I meant something. That I mattered as a constituent of the universe.

Suddenly, he stopped.

Maybe that’s just it. I do have a purpose. The universe is so big, that everything is big. Everything matters. I’ve been feeling small in the midst of it all, when really I am what makes it all. Me, and everyone else.

He did not know how long he stood there, reveling at the enormity of Everything.

The Enormity of Everything © Safira Schiowitz