Dark Matter

I am sitting in my backyard, in the dark. Click. My flashlight beam cuts through the dark in a perfectly straight line at 300,000,000 meters per second. Click. It disappears, absorbed by the darkness. Click. There. Click. Not there.

I have made up my mind to not count the number of clicks. But after “a lot” of clicks, I start to wonder where Connor is. Did he forget about the meteor shower tonight? Click, click, click. Maybe, during my absence, he found out that I finished off his secret stash of gummi bears. Click, click, click. Is he mad at me?

Or maybe he saw one of the papers.

I drop the flashlight. That’s got to be it. He must have seen one of them.

I try to mentally rewind through today. The papers— Between the time that I got home, until now—He must have seen one— did I take a piece of paper— I’m thinking about papers again — and write something absolutely horrible about him on it? I must have written— I would never— I wrote on a paper somewhere— ever do that. Stop thinking about papers. But maybe I did? Stop—

I click the flashlight on and get up. I have to go check. I have to go check. I have to go—

“Hey, where are you going?”

I stop and swing the beam around again. Connor is standing there with a picnic blanket and his telescope tucked under one arm, a bag of gummi bears in his hand.

I shift, biting my lip and looking from my house back to him. After about three seconds, I burst out, “Did you—?”

“Nope, I have not seen any papers of any type with anything written on them,” Connor says as he shakes out the picnic blanket. And for the millionth time, I am jealous of how sure he is. For some reason, doubt never sends him running back home next-door to double-check.

“You’re sure?” I ask.

“I’m sure,” Connor says with a bit of a grin.

I shift again, looking back through the dark to my house. “Hold on,” I say. “I just have to—”

“Wait, wait,” Connor says. I stop, but click the flashlight a couple times. “The nothing-paper,” he reminds me. “Do you have it with you?”

The nothing-paper. I reach into my back pocket and pull out a crumpled sheet of paper.

While Connor assembles the telescope, I unfold the paper. I turn it over and check both sides. The paper is blank. Nothing written on it, just like always. I check both sides again. Still nothing.

Of course there are no papers, I tell myself. In fact, there have never been any actual papers. All of the hurtful things that I fear having written on them have never been real. They’re not there. I still check both sides one more time.

“You good?” Connor asks. He watches me fold the paper back up, his eyebrow raised. He always remembers the nothing-paper. Probably because if he didn’t, he’d be spending most of his nights stargazing alone.

“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks.” I put the paper back in my pocket. I don’t want to be checking papers all night. Once, I spent the night checking every single page of his astronomy notebook and almost missed an entire lunar eclipse. I don’t want to do that to Connor tonight. I want to watch the meteor shower.

“Sorry I was late,” Connor says as we plop down on the picnic blanket with the gummi bears in between us. The picnic blanket, once the perfect length for two fifth graders to lie down on, is now too short and our flip-flops hang over the edge. “I had to get some more gummi bears. Something happened to the rest of my stash.”

I don’t say anything. To him, it’s a simple, uncluttered train of thought. They’re gone, so you get more.

“There’s the first one,” Connor says, pointing. I look up just in time to see the first meteor flash across the sky.

I look over at Connor and wonder what it would be like to have a brain that knows what’s really there and what’s not. I imagine his thoughts ricocheting through his brain like little meteors. There are no phantom papers—no phantom anything—to arrest his thoughts on the way from Point A to Point B.

“Why do you put up with me asking about non-existent papers all the time?” I find myself asking.

“Because you wouldn’t ask me about them if you thought they didn’t exist,” Connor replies. “It’s like...” he thinks for a second. “Dark matter.”

I find my flashlight in the dark and click it on and off a few times. I imagine the beam as a thought trying to travel through my mind, suddenly overtaken by an OCD cloud of intangible cosmic nothingness that scientists have dubbed dark matter. A thought that is stopped, literally by nothing. It makes me even more jealous of Connor’s clear Milky Way mind.

“How would you even know?” I ask. “You don’t feel like you have to check every single piece of paper that blows across your path for mean thoughts that you’ve never written,” I say.

“No,” Connor admits. “But I know it’s really hard for you to deal with.”

“Don’t you think it’s stupid?” I ask. “You know they’re not there. I know they’re not there. Everyone knows they’re not there.”

“Maybe,” Connor says. “But that doesn’t stop you from thinking about it.” The way he says it is so off-handed, but the truth in it zips white-hot through my synapses. He sits up and pulls the telescope closer to us and after looking into it a few moments, he beckons me to scoot over. “See all that stuff in between the stars?” he asks.

I look into the lens, but I don’t see what he’s talking about. I only see little pinpoints of stars in a circle of darkness. “I don’t see anything,” I say, looking back up.

“Dark matter,” Connor says with a slow smile. “Undetectable by every type of reliable instrument—”

“But it still bends light like it has mass,” I finish for him. “It’s not there, but it is.” Connor pops three more gummi bears into his mouth and we are silent long enough for two meteors to enter the atmosphere and burn up. I try to remember what it was like to think before the papers were there—or not there—whatever. I find the flashlight and start clicking it again.

Connor suddenly reaches over and gently pulls the flashlight from my hand. “But light can still pass through dark matter,” he says. He clicks on the flashlight, shooting the beam into the sky. “I think that’s the most important part,” he says.

I look over to Connor again, but he points to the sky. The shower has started and hundreds of crystal clear meteors streak through the darkness. Maybe some of them are passing through dark matter. Maybe some of them aren’t.

And as Connor clicks off the flashlight for the final time that night, I wonder if maybe he’s right. That maybe it doesn’t matter what’s in between point A and point B. It’s more important that you get there.