"The Last Five Seconds"

Searching for answers has always been at the forefront of my mind. As a boy, I played with spaceships, looking to the stars for answers. I played with dinosaurs, asking God why the beginning began. Now, despite the wishes of my well-intentioned wife, I work 72 hours at a research facility in downtown Chicago. Before last Tuesday, the Chicago Facility of Cosmology had stayed out of the media. Our recent findings changed this, however. Now, the media can’t get enough of me nor my colleagues.

At first, the project was merely a means to stroking our egos. We were testing the extent to which our intergalactic telescope could see. We weren’t looking for anything specific, but then we saw something that piqued our interest; the distant star, Icarus, had disappeared out of thin air. It was gone, right before our eyes. What was once nine billion light-years away was now lost into the vastness of space, it’s light shining no more. We called the phenomenon: “The Swallowing”.

Our theories ranged from black holes to planetary gravitational pull, but to no avail. The sighting seemed to have no explanation...until, two days later, when we saw the star, Crete, disappear. Crete, a star four million light-years away, was gone. Whatever was causing “The Swallowing” was getting closer.

We contacted several international cosmology agencies to confer with their top scientists, and a researcher from Argentina jokingly mentioned: “The Big Crunch”.

Since the Big Bang, the universe has been slowly expanding, similar to a rubber band being stretched. Problematically, however, at some point, the universe will run out of matter to stretch. Researchers hypothesized that at this point, this “rubber band” would snap, initiating a collapse of space-time. This “Big Crunch” would take the universe back to it’s point of origin, the Big Bang.

Most of the researchers in the call pushed this theory to the side, discrediting it as purely hypothetical, but the idea didn’t sit right with me. I thought it may be wise to look into it further, and my team of researchers began to look beyond the rim of nine-million light years. What we saw was something so beautifully terrifying that it stopped us in our tracks: nothing. For the first time in human history, we had seen pure nothingness. It was as if a wall had blocked us from seeing any further into the depths of space. There were no stars, no matter, no color, nor was there a lack there-of. It was pure nothingness.

Within hours, the United Nations had contacted us, asking what the ramifications of our findings were. To the best of our ability, we attempted to estimate how much time we had before our world was swallowed. This “Crunch” was moving at an unprecedented speed, so we gave the UN our prediction: 36 hours. 36 hours? That wasn’t even half of my work week. Whistleblowers made sure that the rest of the world knew, all before the UN could draft up some lazy attempt at calming the public.

First, there was confusion, then the panic set in. Anarchy was next. Stores were overturned, government facilities were raided; it seemed as if the world was on fire.

As soon as I left the research facility, I raced down I-94 West to my home in the suburbs. My family's home in the suburbs. My family. In the commotion of the research, I hadn’t had the time to think of my wife. Going 85 down the desolate highway, I grabbed my phone to call my wife, and there, on the lock screen, sat four notifications from my wife:

2 Hours Ago:“Hey baby, hope everythings alright there in the city. Keep calm <3”

1 Hour Ago: “Sirens going off here. We are in the basement. What’s going on, Gale?

20 Minutes Ago: “Things are getting scary. Please come home soon. Etta needs you.”

7 Minutes Ago: “Please I’m scared, baby.”

I looked up from my phone into my rearview mirror. My skin was a ghastly white color, and my breath was now shaky. My ears finally opened up to hear sirens, both emergency vehicles and the civil-defense sirens. The fear had finally set in.

About three miles from our home, every other house was completely engulfed in flames, screams permeating the entire block. Arsonists sprinted from house to house, and the scavengers followed behind them, which arguably seemed pointless to me. Money and family heirlooms had no value in a world with only hours left in her life.

Storming into my house, I found my six-year old daughter, Etta, and wife huddled in a corner of the basement. I kissed them for what seemed like forever and an instant all in one, finally coming to the realization that these were our last moments. No words were spoken for quite some time. There was just a mutual understanding that, right now, talking would take up too much time.

My family slowly made our way into our basement family room. We sat at the table in silence for several more minutes until my daughter asked, “What’s going to happen, daddy?”

My voice cracked as I called her over to my lap. She sat there, and I smiled into her eyes.

“Everything’s going to be alright,” I said, as my eyes darted to the heart shaped locket around Etta’s neck. I pointed to it. “You know what it says in here?”

“I love you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I laughed, sucking in my tears, “It says I love you.”

My wife smiled, a tear slowly coming down her face. It was a cheesy locket that I waited in line an hour to get, but it was what Etta had wanted for her birthday. And to think, I had been so angry that I was missing work to get her that present.

The next several hours were full of self-reflection, talking with my family, and a lot of physical embrace. Soon, the sky went from blue to deep darkness. My wife, daughter, and I stood in the window, looking out, as the sky became swallowed by nothingness. It was the “Big Crunch”, crunching away every star I had ever looked at as a child.

In those five seconds before the nothingness consumed us, I grabbed tightly on my daughter and memories filled my head. My daughter's birth, the most beautiful moment of my entire life, stayed at the center of it all.

And then there was nothing.

When the pain disappeared, I opened my eyes to see pure nothingness. But this was a different kind of nothing. It was a bright nothingness, full of light, full of a feeling of wholeness. I thought at first that it was heaven, but there was no St. Peter nor pearly gates. It was just me, Gale Atkins, in a sea of nothing. Soon, in the distance, something familiar appeared. Again, it was hard to explain, but it was the beginning. A door into where my life began.

It then hit me that the theorists had the “Big Crunch” all wrong. When the universe collapsed, the origin point was not the Big Bang. No. The origin point was my origin point, the birth of my universe. For centuries, we had propagated the myth that we lived in a geo-centric universe, that the universe revolves around Earth. Scientists then theorized that instead, it was a heliocentric universe, that the Earth revolved around the sun. Rather, we lived in an auto-centric universe, a universe that revolved around each and every one of us. We all had our own universe, our own origin point, and our own crunch.

All of those questions that I had wondered about in life, they stood there in that doorway of origin, too. But whereas previously the voices of curiosity had been loud, they were now quiet. Curiosity left my head, and, despite the fact that I had answers, all that I could focus on was the moments.

You see, my life was about more than uncovering the reasons for our existence, about more than questioning the characteristics of the universe, about more than the end. As a child, I had seen the Facebook posts that fell into the category of overused platitudes: “Life is not about the destination. Instead, it is about the journey”. The journey. The moments.

In those final five seconds in front of my window, what I had seen, that was the journey. I had been so wrapped in searching for answers, that oftentimes stepping back had slipped my mind. I had forgotten that life was about my mother making Eggo waffles before school, about the first date with my wife, about the heart-shaped locket I had bought my daughter. And those moments, they were all I needed in my universe.