Crunch

Every day, the horizon feels a little bit closer. You learned one day, you don’t know when or how, of a theory on the flipside of the Big Bang, that just as the universe exploded from one point, to that same point must it snap back together. One great big crunch, and the universe in all its majesty is no more. For a while, you believed in entropy: all heat will expend itself into the cold expanse of the cosmos until it’s nothing but atoms spread as thin as possible, and as the universe keeps expanding, those atoms grow further and further apart. It’s like being drawn and quartered, you think, except instead of your limbs, it’s every microscopic piece of you.

You stare into the fire that brisk early March night and you wonder. You’re camping with friends you haven’t seen in a long, long time, friends who you drifted back together with after months after months of dreary separation, and you should be elated by this. Here you are around a campfire in the dead of night, life buzzing laughter in your periphery, but you can’t help but glance skyward past the budding branches and find the heavens starless. Your lungs are suddenly empty and full at once, and you feel dizzy until words snap you back to senses.

“So?” asks Derek from the other side of the fire, locking eyes with you.

“So what?” you say, conscious finally.

“Tell us a story,” says Derek, his stubbly face hardly illuminated in the dancing embers of the dimming flame. “Twenty bucks to whoever tells the best owl story.”

“Why owls?” you ask, and Dani next to you says directly and breathily into your ear, “Because he likes owls now.” Her voice sounds like cheap beer and burnt marshmallows, and it makes you feel warm for once. You stifle a laugh. The universe is being stretched into oblivion, and these people want to hear about owls, so you spin a yarn about a great big barn owl who fell in love with its own reflection, flew right into it, shattered itself and its reflection in one fell swoop, and died a mangled mess in the mulch beneath a farmhouse window. It’s a veiled metaphor for your failed relationships. You do not win twenty dollars that night.

Albert stands up and announces bravely that he has to take a leak. As he ambles off into the shadowy brush, you realize just how small your world is in this moment, how you can hardly see anything past the three benches triangulated around the campground’s cast iron firepit. Derek reaches behind him, heaves a great dry log into the fire, and the world grows and shrinks again. In that moment, you remember the Crunch, and you wonder if that’s what you’re seeing right now, if the embers rising are the fire’s great act of rebellion against the end of the universe.

A twig snaps in the distance, and Albert comes back, smelling faintly of urine. You banter like you used to. “Oh, I thought I saw a hideous sasquatch, but it was just you, Albert.” Laughter pierces the darkness, your own rebellion against the convergence of all things.

You’re not sure why she does it: if she’s spooked by a hoot or howl or chirp from the distant brambles, or if she yearns for warmth in the suppressive cold, or if she just wants to feel you against her because there’s always been such a gravity between the two of you, but in that markless moment, Dani decides to fall into you and stay there for a brief forever. You always loved that gravity, the way you would meet each other like two converging heavens, and when you two went your separate ways that past summer to explore opposite corners of the world, you realized that everything you ever needed to know about the human experience was in that gravity. Right then, you choose to believe in the Crunch. After all, after so much time apart, you much prefer the closeness these gentle endtimes provide.