Some scientists believe the universe is infinite. We know it to be flat, so it stands to reason it may go on forever. In such a universe, an infinite number of things happen an infinite number of times. Infinity is scary. It means every second somewhere out there you die. It means an infinite number of you are suffering through heartbreaks and final goodbyes. As of late I’ve watched a lot of videos about our universe; its size — just how massive it is. Realizing how cosmically worthless we are. I can’t watch anything else anymore. My life is confined to space, dinos, and cowering behind a locked door. Since the diagnosis, I haven’t been whole.
I don’t know how to be happy.
I try my best. Dinos and space have always made me happy. Since I was a kid. So I flooded my walls with dinos. All of various shapes and sizes. A green stegosaurus sitting on a hill next to a family of multi-coloured tyrannosauruses, eating popcorn, and snuggling together. Off to the left sits a dark blue brontosaurus. On the opposite wall: a family of vibrant triceratops and my favourite — palaeoscincus. Above all the dinos, in the middle of my wall, I painted a shooting star. Or more accurately, an asteroid. That’s why they’ve gathered. To look upon their impending doom. To look up.
*
Years ago, my parents took my brother and I on a trip to Chicago. I was young and entitled, so after seeing it on a pamphlet, I demanded we go to the planetarium. My mind was ablaze like a supernova. The colourless monotony of our planet was replaced by the vibrancy of the great beyond. From then on, I developed a habit of looking up whenever I felt down. I started making my mom drive me to amateur astronomer meet-ups at an art gallery nearby. Once a month we’d go into the parking lot and take a look into their many-thousand-dollar telescopes. I gazed upon Venus, Mars, Saturn, a distant galaxy, and a cluster of stars that looked like E.T. It would range from odd to absurd, but it kept the wonder alive — I was happy.
*
Every person you meet imparts something. Pain, joy, love, lust — we are an ever-changing topography of the people we’ve let close. Like asteroids, they strike our hearts. Some are small. Some are so massive it’s a wonder they are still there.
*
Years of bombardments scar my outlook on life. If you looked at my heart, it’d look like the moon: devoid of life and cratered. When I was 14, I let my guard down. I let someone close. He left with a meteor shower, hurling his friends’ judgments at me. I left with new shades of shame, vehemently hating my body. That’s a dent in a cracked comet.
When the pandemic hit I moved out to live with someone else. I dropped my armour to be at peace. I now know to never let my guard down. I still have the scars, mental and physical, to prove it.
But a year and a half later I met Nick. It was June. It felt like finding the first sign of life in an alien world. It was new, exciting, and unknown. I was too entranced by the discovery to notice the hostility. Blinded by the gleam from his pale blue eyes. Most love feels like the sun on a hot summer day, so warm and radiant, you find yourself lost on a clear path. It was only later I realized that there were no stars above, but rather a pinhole in the hood he’d placed over my head.
The first night we spent together I woke at 2:00am, as I always did. I jolted up with my usual panic, both startled and terrified. Yet this time I felt something new. A warmth. In what many would describe as a chokehold I felt a new sensation: safety.
I felt that, in that moment, I could break to pieces and he would hold me together. That after everything I’d been through, I could trust again.
I fell over and over again.
June turned to July, then to August. We travelled all around Southern Ontario. Every time somewhere new: a beach, a town, a provincial park we’d just heard about. Even with the new world whisking past, my gaze always landed on him. Him and his eyes.
As the months grew colder, so did he. In September the visits grew shorter, too. At the end of my two-hour drives I’d be tolerated for 15 minutes. Every time he had an excuse. He would tell me he needed to do laundry, or he just wanted to smoke and sleep. I tried to be as perfect as he demanded. Yet he grew colder still. As he drifted away with my self-worth, stripping me for parts in the process, the nightmares returned.
*
I remember when I went camping with Nick up north. I spent hours staring straight up to admire the stunning cosmos, enchanted by the arms of the milky way, slashing through the perfect dispersion of stars that define the night sky. Though they may seem small, the void between each one is so terrifyingly infinite. So astronomically massive — so cold and empty.
It was below zero, typical for late October in Killarney. There we sat on the well-worn picnic table we’d moved next to the fire pit. Neither of us spoke for hours — we rarely made eye contact. Maybe it was because we were both high, or maybe it was his typical frigidity. My thoughts erupted from my mouth.
“Did I deserve to be raped?”
It took him a moment, he looked up, then said, “No.”
We gazed at the stars in silence until the embers died. Then we went into the tent. I remember asking him to cuddle me. He turned over. He didn’t. I should have remembered he didn’t like intimacy.
*
The end began Christmas Eve at 8:00pm. “We need a break,” the text read. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” Christmas was shrouded by tears, waiting, willing him to call. He didn’t. Six days later I heard from him. He said he wanted to keep seeing me, to keep going places, keep fucking. He just didn’t want any intimacy.
It felt like a black hole growing inside of me. A pit. A despair of infinite density slowly expanding and swallowing any semblance of light. It devoured my life. The worthlessness. And in the deceitful void? Memories.
*
Though black holes may look empty, they are anything but. Beyond the event horizon is a mass so dense that no light can escape. An eidetic memory is like a black hole. Information can’t be destroyed. No matter how hard you try. That information, that mass of sadness, digs into the singularity — expanding its devastation. There are benefits — no studying, yet always at the top of your class. But then your brain warps into a torturous slideshow: a graphic retread of trauma. The parasitic memories pile up in a tower tall enough to pass the Moon and Mars. All it took to topple me was a light push.
*
Once — not long after it happened — I was on a date. At a steakhouse. Fancy as hell; vintage chandeliers, leather booths.
James is stunning. Across from him sits 30 mental illnesses in a trench coat. Ready to erupt at any moment. We begin with small talk; catching up on work and the weather. He has my full attention — I’m trying my damn best to impress. Then it happens.
It starts as an abnormally bright glint from the chandelier. Slowly, stars fill the restaurant, clouding my vision; then my memory loses signal and fades to static. My consciousness is tuned out for no longer than a minute. The next thing I remember is a warmth on my hands. Blood. The nightmares had evolved. I tried to escape my own memories with the ferocity of a caged animal. I unconsciously drew blood in a crowded room. I left. I felt ashamed. That hit was enough to crack me. I was ready to die.
I drove to a cliff overlooking Hamilton. I sat in my car, alone, staring over the ledge. Even through city lights, the stars are there if you look close enough. I could see them faintly – I was ready to join them. There was only one way my world could get darker. Forever.
All it would take is a little pressure on the gas. No one was there to stop me. In a universe of infinite possibilities and innumerable people, there was no one to pull me back. My foot felt heavier with each moment.
At that moment, the universe called out. Taylor Swift as its mouthpiece sang: “Please, don’t go.”
It sounds pathetic. I know how pathetic it is. Yet after a decade of one-sided conversations, the cosmos called. They pleaded for me to keep going. I drove home in silence. The next day I crumbled in my dad’s arms. He took me to CAMH. I told no one about that night. It was between me and the stars — an interstellar secret.
They diagnosed me with PTSD. I was a man lost in time, trying to make his way through space.
*
Our view of space is much like a time machine. At any moment when you look up, you look upon a mosaic chronology of the universe. Look a little to the left? You see that star as it was two billion years ago. A little to the right? Only a million. I live life as I stargaze. At any moment, with the slightest shift, I reface people and memories long thought dead. It’s hard to be in a million places at once. Never present. It takes a toll on you.
The psychologist told me my trauma tower had come tumbling.
He told me it wasn’t common at my age.
He told me I’d get through it.
He told me one day I’d be happy.
I try my best to be happy. I take the drugs they tell me to. But I no longer sleep in my bed in fear that the rape dreams will return. Instead, I’ve moved into one of the rooms in our basement. It was there I painted dinosaurs on the walls and turned my ceiling into a galaxy. Every night I cast stars above me. I snuggle up under the blanket and two stools I’ve decreed a tent. I turn on the heater – one of those that resemble a fire pit – I lay down – my head sticking out.
And I look up.
In my makeshift campsite, I stare at the ever-turning stars. I imagine the cosmos. I imagine that, in a universe of infinite possibilities, another me is looking up. I know that he’ll make it through.
In an infinite universe, we all do.