A Speck in the Cosmos

March 1, 2021

EXT. A QUIET TOWN’S PADDY FIELD – Early Morning

The view of our galaxy looking back down at me is far more incredible in person, I’ve come to realize, as I compare the barely there white pixels on my phone as the result of my camera struggling to capture the sky; faint dots that should represent the storm of stars that morning, and it almost feels prodigious in a way – the contrast reminds me of how minuscule and insignificant we are in the unfathomable scale of everything.

And yet, the reality of us being nothing more than space dust against the infinite stretch of space and the unknown can be, in its own way, comforting.

During the day, when the world is bright and full of color, it’s easy to forget what’s beyond the blinding blue constantly hovering over us. Sometimes the light can obscure our vision, that often times we fool ourselves into thinking we’re boxed within our own world – the sky nothing but wallpaper, wrapping us all nicely. The light acts as a safety blanket, and because of that humanity sometimes grows cocky. Isn’t it funny how we once thought that the Sun revolved around the Earth, instead of the Earth being just mere space debris, that happened to be close enough to get strung along the Sun’s gravity? How human it truly is, to forget that your own existence is not the center of the universe, always one step behind when it comes to finding out what reality even is, why we’re here, if our existence is even supposed to make sense. If there is a far bigger purpose that we’re unaware of.

This existence. Of being here right now, in this exact time and place, in a corner of this universe — it’s intimidating, and incredible, and frustratingly inconceivable that it almost leaves you out of breath – but we’re much more alike to the unknown than we think.

No matter how small and bland in comparison we are, like the stars, we’re much more than what outsiders, onlookers – strangers – perceive and ought our existence to be. A star may look nothing more than a speck, a grain, but its size is far greater than anything the human that’s viewing it has ever witnessed firsthand. In a crowd, we may dim in comparison to others — but that does not mean we’re insignificant. A star, no matter how small it is in our line of vision, does not change the reality of its size. Value and depth cannot be measured by merely watching from afar.

We are great, burning bright, as we are. We’re an interesting bunch, don’t you think? We live in a measly rock, in a measly system, in a measly galaxy, being swept through space like an irrelevant grain of sand among trillions of other space rock, stars and dark matter. It’s crowded out there, but so is it here. We are merely a sea of faces, fighting for survival, trying to stay above water — finding our purpose, our true meaning, our reason to keep going, all while being so microscopic that it doesn’t even make sense.

But I think there’s something quite beautiful about that.

We are the universe, just like the stars are the universe. We came from the unknown — a burst of energy, time and space short circuiting, an ongoing question of being, that we can never entirely comprehend.

We are constant, ever thriving. Like stars, we don’t simply cease after we die — reminiscent to how it takes a few lightyears for a dead star’s light to reach us, our existence is obstinate. Occurrences like a star’s collapse, of remains from something that no longer exists that still persists, that keep shining, going, long after the source is gone – it is akin to us. Like dead stars, it may also take another hundred years to erase the evidence of our existence completely. Not as humans, but as us. The people that we are, that exist now and in the future, once existed. We don’t end after we’re gone. Our light remains where we’ve been, who we’ve touched, how we’ve lived.

We’re nothing short of a miracle.

Maybe it’s quite human of me to think like this. To decipher us out to be more than what we are. “Does the universe, perhaps, exist solely to be understood by consciousness?” — this question tends to settle whenever I look up, and the city lights are too far to drown out the small strip of our galaxy, that for a short moment, we’re able to view. Is humanity really a miracle, or are we just a cosmic coincidence?

And maybe we don’t have to have the answer.

Maybe for the next thousand years, we still won’t have the answer, maybe until we’re nothing but a dim light in the distance.

But isn’t that fine? We exist in this moment, where life is too much, and it’s almost impossible to believe anything that can be so unfair can be a miracle — where our backs have grown too heavy, that we can barely look up to remind ourselves how fleeting we are.

We exist, for a short blip in time — but in that split second, we get to live through this coincidence, meet each other and ask questions we will never have the answers to.

We don’t have to know, we don’t have to understand, because at the end of the day, and maybe the end of time, the universe does not exist to be understood by specks that happened to look up…

(Maybe it exists merely to be experienced.)

A Speck in the Cosmos

2021

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