Dark Matter

by Blake Crouch

And maybe that’s what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when you’re least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace.

It’s the beautiful thing about youth. There’s a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.

We’re all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglas.

“We all live day to day completely oblivious to the fact that we’re a part of a much larger and stranger reality than we can possibly imagine.”

Eyes you can fall into and keep falling.

“It’s terrifying when you consider that every thought we have, every choice we could possibly make, branches into a new world.

Most astrophysicists believe that the force holding stars and galaxies together—the thing that makes our whole universe work—comes from a theoretical substance we can’t measure or observe directly. Something they call dark matter. And this dark matter makes up most of the known universe.”

The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that all possible realities exist. That everything which has a probability of happening is happening. Everything that might have occurred in our past did occur, only in another universe.

If he did this to you, he would have rationalized it somehow. That’s how decent people justify bad behavior.

I am hardwired to love and protect that woman.

“Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child. Maybe it doesn’t make sense at a surface level, but the subconscious marches to its own beat.

It’s a troubling paradox—I have total control, but only to the extent I have control over myself.

All the tiny, seemingly insignificant details upon which my world hangs.

What a miracle it is to have people to come home to every day. To be loved. To be expected.

Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.

Being with Daniela isn’t like being home. It defines home.

If you go in with fear, fear is what you’ll find.”