Evermore

"The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moon­less air;

Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,"

-Lord Byron

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It wouldn't be long now.

The man was very aware as his last moments approached, wrapped in metal and foil, floating for weeks and weeks. His sanity remained only due to the ever present selection of music in his vacuum surrounded auditorium.

He had replayed the event of ultimate consequence in his mind thousands of times since its occurrence; It was a routine spacewalk with eight of his crewmates, repairing the microfiber structural breaches that accumulate over long space voyages. Space dust can be deadly traveling thousands of kilometers a second in the wrong direction. And who would have guessed he'd be hit while repairing their original tragedy.

It had knocked him clear off the side of the ship, ripped off the ships plates that were magnetically suctioned to his boots. And shredded the tether attaching him to the ship and his spacewalking buddies.

He had hoped they would have had the situational awareness to at least attempt a rescue, but looking back, he finally found it in his heart to forgive them. After all, they were simultaneously sucked up and ripped from the ship, at least some of them, though none appeared completely severed.

All he had time to do was shut the hole left by his absent tether, and turn on the self contained life support system, creating a little life like suit embryo of safety. The batteries said he could maintain system integrity for at least two months, more if he kept his breathing down and suit temperature lowered.

But now, nine weeks later, his display was dimming and he knew his time was near, looking out into the greatness of space, legs dangling toward Polaris, he finished his last Journal entry 'Evermore.'

And the hunch was being confirmed, they had barely missed it, but he hadn’t. What was beginning to happen almost made his weeks of futile survival worthwhile.

You see, when entering a black hole, the first thing you notice isn’t the black hole, it’s the stars. The gravitational well, ever so subtly refracts the incoming light. Already lost to the galaxy this light is still visible to the Astronaut as he passes the event horizon. The light circles around the singularity, orbiting into the eyes of a man about to face a worthy end.

How the constellations can bend and weave and dance! And as the hours passed, something very interesting happened; they multiplied into millions of multilayered, multihued colors, expanding across the full light spectrum. And the constellations weren’t just bending, they were changing their fixed patterns! How is this possible? Then the man realized relativity was causing time to pass faster and faster outside the black hole as he approached its center.

The man gazed out in wonder as it dawned on him that it wasn’t just him headed into eternity. As he faced his end, he turned to face outward, observing, with great privilege, the universe head into oblivion!

And one by one by handfull by waves of stars began to twinkle out, some fading into black, others exploding into glory then evaporating like a vapor and all the light began to tint red.

Too large to be fully appreciated, the man simply pondered his situation. How could the Universe end? How could it end before his eyes? Before him? What would come of this ‘forever’ beyond his life, beyond the life of the Universe? Time to him was quickly approaching infinity, but he would never have enough to understand the forever that approached, the vastness of eternity, this ‘Evermore.’

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