It’s night, finally, and I feel the shift before I consciously register it, as though my body recognizes the hour long before my mind does. The tightness I have been carrying all day loosens by degrees, so subtly at first that you almost miss it. Until I notice that I am no longer bracing against anything.
I stop listening for notifications that haven’t arrived yet. I stop rehearsing conversations that may never happen. The vigilance that follows me through daylight begins to thin, and in its absence I realize how exhausted I have been from holding myself slightly alert for hours.
My thoughts begin to travel outward, toward something larger and quieter; toward the Universe that continues expanding whether I am tense or at rest, whether I am needed or entirely forgotten. It always begins like this. I do not decide to think about the Universe; I simply find myself there, as though the quiet creates a corridor between my small, interior life and that vast, indifferent expanse.
The same darkness that settles around my room stretches immeasurably beyond it; for a moment the distance between my thoughts and that scale feels thinner than it should. I am still sitting in the same place, still contained within the same walls, and yet my mind is moving across distances I cannot comprehend, holding both my own small fatigue and the enormity of everything that exists beyond it in the same breath.
I find myself thinking about the Universe in a deeply personal one, like it’s something I have been in conversation with for years.
At night, the Universe does not feel distant, though I know it remains immeasurable and beyond my understanding. Its vastness stays intact, yet the darkness around me makes it seem nearer, as if the space outside my window is only a fragment of something far greater continuing quietly beyond sight. I think about how it is always expanding into regions I cannot imagine, holding within that movement both destruction and creation at once. Stars collapse even as others ignite, endings give way to beginnings, and none of it pauses for explanation or apology. It simply happens, as though the Universe has never confused ending with failure.
In all of it, a powerful resonance gathers in me around a single word: REBIRTH.
An immediate realization passes across my countenance. My life, too, has been filled with quiet opportunities to be reborn; not once, but again and again. Versions of me have ended unceremoniously, and something else has taken their place. I didn’t always recognize those moments as beginnings, but they were. They were “rebirths”. And I strongly believe, you may find the same is true for you; endings that only remade you.
There’s something oddly comforting in that thought.
Maybe that is why I am drawn to the Universe with a familiarity I cannot quite justify. When I look at it, I do not feel like a spectator. The Universe feels entwined with my life, inseparable from it, and I no longer feel the need to explain why. I sit with the comforting dark and let it remain vast and unresolved, allowing myself to stay within that uncertainty without trying to move past it.