The Last Gifts of the Universe

by Riley August

Seven hundred years ago, technology gave us the keys to the cosmos, and we flew and teleported and phased out into the stars, arms spread, minds open, ready to meet the neighbors. What we found was a graveyard. Hundreds of once-civilized systems, all absent of life. Not destroyed, not nuked, or glassed, or buried beneath volcanic residue so completely that it would justify a whole world gone dark. Just...lifeless. Dead. And we don’t know why.

Sometimes I wonder why I do anything or if anything I do matters.

bobbing almost cutely. But don’t get me wrong. Refuse crawlers are savage little things. “Life,” my father said, “is what we have the most in common with every other creature. We all want to live and we become scared when living is threatened. All of us just want to survive and be comfortable, be happy.”

It’s strange what hindsight does. Takes all the layers of emotions and flattens them, turns them either good or bad. It can take time to see the shadows as something beautiful.

There was no deeper feeling of failure than to complete all the prerequisites for happiness and yet not achieve it.

I love being out in the universe. I love the stars, space, other worlds, the hum of the ship when I sleep. Whenever I’m home, planet-side, it’s so easy to get caught up in things. The news. The wars. The economy. Pushing paper, getting promotions, an endless slew of new movies and games and content and products. It’s easy to lose sight of the sky, to fall into the pattern of thinking that the only things that matter are the ones I find myself surrounded with. I suffocate back home. Even when Mom was there, I suffocated.

Even at its core, even without common experience, there is something universal about loss. I can feel it, deep as heartache. Something stirs at loss. Something awakens to it, like a knowing, like an understanding, that this is how everything ends.

You would think that alone would build empathy. That all of us having been blessed with, or serendipitously thrown into, a chance to experience a small fraction of all time in the universe would make us kinder to each other or the world kinder to us. But it doesn’t, a lot of the time. A lot of the time, due to other people, or our own actions, or plain circumstance, bad things happen. Things that terrify us. Things we can’t control.

Death comes for us all. Even suns die. Galaxies die. One day, the universe will die. I can’t help but think that my favorite paintings bear both the sun and the storm, or that all great stories—both in fiction and in our very lives—are necessarily touched by joy and sadness in fighting measures. I can’t help but remember that love, for our partners, our families, our friends, is an invitation for grief.

I hope you one day recognize grief’s beauty, learn to live with the shadows, to understand that the only reason they could be so dark is because they were cast by so much light.

“Life is a gift, Scout,” my mom told me. “Yours is just for you. Every moment. Every second. Run with it. Cherish it. Breathe it all in, Scout. That’s how you say thank you.” She pulled me to her. Either I was very heavy, or she very weak. “Don’t waste it,” she said. “Don’t ever give it away. Don’t ever settle for something that doesn’t make you happy. Okay, my baby? Never stop fighting to make the best of it. Never stop fighting to make it better.”

I don’t know what the future will bring, but I know that right now, Pumpkin is with me, my brother is with me, and that we’re about to go watch an amazing, terrible, impossible movie with robot vampires. I get up with Pumpkin, who trots eagerly beside me toward the den, and I tell myself, This one is.