Bewilderment

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AND THEN ONE DAY, MY SON IS THERE, inside my head as sure as life. My wife, too, still inside him. What they felt, then, I now feel. Which is bigger, outer space or inner?

He doesn’t say a thing. He doesn’t have to. I know what he wants from me. He only wants to see what’s out there. Light travels at three hundred thousand kilometers a second. It takes ninety-three billion years to cross from one end of space to the other, past black holes and pulsars and quasars, neutron and preon and quark stars, metallics and blue stragglers, binaries and triple-star systems, globular and hypercompact clusters, coronal, tidal, and halo galaxies, reflection and plerion nebulae, stellar, interstellar, and intergalactic disks, dark matter and energy, cosmic dust and filaments and voids, all spun from the laws folded up into vibrations far smaller than the smallest units we have names for. The universe is a living thing, and my son wants to take me for a quick look around while there’s still time.

We rise together into orbit high above the place we’ve been visiting. The thought occurs to him, and I have it. Can you believe where we just were?

Oh, this planet was a good one. And we, too, were good, as good as the burn of the sun and the rain’s sting and the smell of living soil, the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.