Not Too Bad of a Wait
Time is cyclic.
Parts of me were at the big bang.
All the parts.
That was a long time ago,
But the wait to be born wasn’t too bad.
I doubt the wait after I die will be much worse.
Because I have an iPhone.
When I do die
My constituent particles will slowly dissociate,
First in the ground,
Hopefully in a decent casket,
With an impressive but reasonably-sized tombstone,
And later in free space
Once the Earth too disintegrates.
I will then once again assume the state I embodied
(for lack of a better word)
At the Universe’s inception,
Or maybe I should say “starting line.”
Because of energy loss as heat,
And myriad physical phenomena attributed to Boltzmann,
Or an old omniscient being in the sky,
There will eventually be a big crunch.
And then, before you know it…
Ergo, time is cyclic.
Matt Alexander is a scientist and writer in Philadelphia. When struck by insight, he shouts “Bazinga!”, not “Eureka!”, although he has nothing against Archimedes and is in fact himself an avid bath-taker. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in theEEEL, Zetetic, and After the Pause. Follow him on Twitter at @thenamesmatta.
