Infinite Cosmos

A HALCYON story

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Clara could not sleep, and she was tired of it. Tired in the specific way of a person who has been sleepless for weeks: not just body-tired but tired of being tired, tired of the arithmetic of hours, tired of waking at 3 a.m. to the same three worries chewing on her the way small dogs will chew on a rope.

Tonight the three worries were: a decision at work she could not make, a sentence she had said to someone she loved and could not un-say, and a future she could not, no matter how many hours she spent trying, control from her pillow. She had held these so tightly, for so long, that her hands — literally, when she checked them in the dark — had forgotten how to open.

She lay on her back and gave up. There was no use in trying to sleep. There was no use in trying anything. So instead, on a whim she could not have explained, she closed her eyes and let herself drift up.

Up through the ceiling. Up through the roof. Up past the streetlights and the low steady drift of the city and out into the black above her town. Up past clouds that thinned to nothing, past the thin blue edge of the world where the sky finally admits that it is only air. And out — out into the deep dark where nothing burns except the stars.

She carried her three worries with her, of course. That was rather the point. Up close, in her bedroom, they had felt enormous — planet-sized, sky-sized. They had blocked out everything else. But space, she began to notice, was doing something to their size.

A nebula bloomed to her left, vast and slow and pink, a cloud light-years across where stars were being born like sparks from a very patient forge. Beyond it, a galaxy she did not know the name of turned quietly on its long axis, a hundred billion suns spinning in one unhurried wheel. Beyond that, another. And another. And another. The dark was full of them. It had always been full of them; she had simply never been out here to look.

Against all that slow and patient fire, her three worries did not vanish. It would have been too easy, and she would not have trusted it. What happened was gentler and more durable. The worries simply found their real size. The decision at work was still a decision, but it was a decision on one small blue world among a hundred billion suns in one galaxy among a hundred billion galaxies, and not one of those suns, and not one of those galaxies, was the least bit concerned. The sentence she had said was still said. But it had been said on a Tuesday, on a small planet, by a woman with, cosmically speaking, extremely limited time. There was so much room out here. Room, at last, to set things down.

So she did. One by one, she let them go. She opened her hands — literally, she felt them open — and let the three worries drift free of her. She watched them float away like debris on a calm dark current, growing smaller, then very small, then no longer visible against the enormous quiet of the universe.

She did not remember falling asleep. She only knew that at some point the stars became indistinguishable from the insides of her eyelids, and then indistinguishable from nothing at all, and then it was morning — not slow-motion 3 a.m. morning, but real morning, with light through the curtains and a bird outside and her body deeper into the mattress than it had been in a month.

Her three worries were, of course, still there. That was not the point. The point was that her hands, when she checked them, were open. And she had a place to set things down now. A place vast enough to accept anything she cared to release into it. A place that was always there — turning, patient, indifferent in the kindest possible way — whenever she needed to be reminded of her actual size.

She would not sleep like this every night. She knew that. But she knew now where the room was, when she needed room. And on the loudest nights, she thought, she would drift out again, and she would set things down, and the galaxies would keep turning, and she would sleep.