A Universal Problem

By Cait Scollin (@caitscollin.x)

From my window, the city lies like a bowl crested with hills. This is a few miles away- past the river and under the sky. I saw it again from a golf course, and once more from a hill round the corner where the sun was setting circa ten pm and everything was lit in pink and orange. It was one of those sunsets that makes you want to cry. Something that’s terrifying and softening all at once. The universe is so large. Immediately, this makes me think I am meaningless. My existence is confusing, isolating, and will likely be inconsequential. I mean, I know I can’t do much. I’ll never be one to conquer mars or traverse black holes or anything, and I’m fine with that. So it’s not pressing. Having little control in the grandest of schemes is not the worst and after all, I could never take the pressure.

Then again, I’ve always thought about leaving a mark, or a legacy. Having people remember me for something? I couldn’t tell you what people might remember me for, or whether I’m worth remembering, or whether I even cross people’s minds at all. And I don’t know if everyone thinks the same things or whether life is amazingly different for each of us. Seven billion and counting, I suppose, and we’re all different. So if you fell in love it would be a different love from mine. When I’m sad it’s a different sadness from yours. I don’t know how feelings work (chemical imbalances, as some may say) and I don’t want to, I just think sometimes about the lives of others. I might spend days obsessing over a detail that does not phase you. Your thoughts will cross subjects I do not know exist, and I imagine you will feel things for them that I could never understand. Even if you tried to tell me, it’s hard to describe a feeling that doesn’t sound abstracted (in colours and temperatures and textures and touches). It might all be in the DNA, I don’t get the science but I remember being told about the scrolls of cells inside us. We’re all programmed from leftover ancestral traits or something. As much as I recognise myself in fifty-year-old family albums and I mistake my sister’s voice for my own… I know I’m not the same as them, as much as they’re not the same as each other. The things in my head, though emerging from the same sort of gene-pool, are wildly different to that in theirs.

So how, through all this difference, our natural selfhood, our own identities, can something I do impact you? Most days I am certain I live in a liminal space; only fractions of myself can be seen throughout the day (often, these being crafted into what I am comfortable being seen). I think for a lot of us, the life you see lived is only like the tip of an iceberg. A text, a cautious smile, an uncandid photograph… Humans are lonely creatures. When we lock our front doors and power down our phones, that’s when we’re truly ourselves. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I savour this. The silence in an empty room. The certainty of an unchanging house, the impartial warmth of walls and objects. Better yet, the very moment when you turn off the lamplight at night - thinking, alone, and completely within your own head. There’s real magic in this. However, if I only show people mere inches of myself, am I ever likely to become remarkable? In this vast universe, out of billions of us, only I know myself inside and out. In an increasingly private and self-conscious world, how do we touch the souls of others?

I imagine souls like pentecostal flames seeping unseen out of us. You don’t recognise mine and I won’t recognise yours, but I have confidence they’re real. From space, maybe astronauts see a world on fire with them. But I think space is the loneliest place to be, and astronauts are too concerned with satellite signals and zero gravity to even look just in case. When people are in space, I wonder if they think about important people. I wonder who has been immortalised through thought into that great black void. I won’t be up there, but maybe someone like Obama or Einstein is. Throughout the years, maybe Buzz and Aldrin remembered the impact of people like Da Vinci or Cleopatra, and Jesus is almost definitely there. But these people aren’t known. They’re remembered by names and dates and artistic representation, but they’re not known to us at all. We’re all mysteries to each other. The universe is a strange strange thing and the people living in it are suitably confusing. We live entwined around each other yet we’ll never understand who we encounter. Once realising this, the truth and inevitability of everything, there is comfort in it. The same comfort you get from looking at the sky at night, or checking the world population (7788481628, by the way). It’s the understanding that you are alone. But so is everyone else, and if we’re all just as lonely as the next guy then it’s not as bad.