Maybe they’ll find this poem
and not know what it is about.
They’ll put it on display in a glass case,
and label it “mysteries from the past”.
I’ll be stuffed with feathers on the other side of the glass,
staring at all of them thinking, “They are silly.”
Little do they know the same fate that befell men
will befall them as well.
Maybe fifty million years after men, and this second race has died,
a third race will rise,
spring from the ground,
from ancestors of city rats – or maybe not.
Maybe men will live on.
Perhaps after I’m long gone, they’ll find a way to colonize the moon,
and then Mars and Jupiter,
and perhaps one day we’ll transcend our solar system,
and even our galaxy.
But one day, billions or trillions of years in the future,
even if men should find a way to colonize all the planets,
all the solar systems and galaxies and quasars in the universe,
the same fate still comes for them.
All the suns will explode, eating and burning all the planets,
and even if the suns don’t explode, a black hole will destroy them,
and if it’s not a black hole, it’s an earth sized asteroid,
and if it’s not an earth sized asteroid, it’s some kind of specific planetary disaster.
They are in for the same fate as us.
Their planets will be gobbled up by the darkness of the vacuum,
until the entire universe – is nothing.
Someday, billions or trillions of years in the future,
all the stars and galaxies and nebulas and quasars and planets and moons,
will be no more.
What a place would space be if it had nothing in it?
There would be no light, only darkness.
Not one single atom would drift through the universe.
And if there are other universes similar to ours out there,
they are in for the same fate.
The same fate that binds all things, animate or not, in the universe,
this concept of space and time,
it unites us, yet it is frivolous.
For all we are now, it is all for nothing.
Googols of years from now,
and googols of years to come after that,
the universe will be nothing.
The ability to travel anywhere infinitely, and arrive nowhere.
The universe will be like a big black room,
this time with no stars and no light.
Once I’m long gone – well I’m here now, and so are you.
It’s a fact that someday this universe will be nothing,
and memory won’t be memory because nothing will be there to remember anything,
And that’s okay.
We have this earth now,
it was given to us on a silver plate.
More important than the earth, we are given time.
One day we’ll all be long gone, and that’s okay.
We have everything that we want now,
we have what we need to our nature now,
we have what time we are allotted.
Spend time as if it's more precious than money.
In this moment, in this very fading image of space,
just breathe.
Because someday we’ll be long gone,
But it is not this day.