Event Horizon

Black holes aren’t explosions.

They’re what’s left after something massive gives up holding itself together.

They form in silence.

A star burns for millions of years:
brilliant, generous, steady.
And then one day it collapses inward
so completely even its own light can’t escape.

But collapse is not an accident.

It is gravity winning.

It is a star choosing to turn inward

instead of continuing to burn.

That’s what your leaving felt like.

Not a fight.

A withdrawal.

A quiet decision, yours,
to fold into yourself
until there was nothing left
for me to reach.

Scientists say once you cross the event horizon
there is no return.

No signal.
No message.
No “hey, it’s me.”

Just absence. Silence.

But the event horizon
is not the black hole.

It is the line.

The invisible boundary where escape becomes impossible.

From the outside, nothing looks different.

The star is still there.
The light still glows.
The sky still appears intact.

But cross that line? and physics change.

Time slows.
Signals stretch.
Light redshifts into silence.

And no one saw the exact moment you slipped past it.

But I did.

And I keep replaying ours
like scientists studying cosmic background radiation,
searching for the moment collapse began.

You sent something like 10 texts to my phone
on a warm March day.
A sudden flare and gravitational shockwave blowing up my phone,
my world,
collapsing my heart almost into itself
like a star exceeding its limit.

Blaming me, my words... NOT you 
for finding them ON YOUR OWN,

like gravity blaming light for crossing the event horizon.

NO ONE SENT YOU HERE but you.

No external force.
No cosmic accident.
You entered the field.

Why did you come here
except to hang me in the vacuum,
to reach escape velocity from something that was never unstable?

Why cross the event horizon
just to say
it swallowed you?

Was it the last time you softened your voice toward me?
The last night you let yourself lean in to goodness, kindness?
The first time you chose distance and called it strength?

The event horizon is quiet.

It does not announce itself.

It simply marks the point where something that could have been saved no longer can be.

Once crossed, even light cannot return.

And you crossed it. Right? You did it?

You chose silence over the risk of burning brighter.

I didn’t know
your absence could be a black hole.

The way conversations bend around it.
The way memories stretch thin trying not to fall in.

At the center of our galaxy
is Sagittarius A* which is four million suns collapsed into one dark certainty,

twenty-six thousand light-years away and still controlling the stars.

That’s the part I hate.

You’re not here.
You don’t call.
You don’t choose.

Except you did.

You chose quiet.
You chose distance.
You chose to let the light bend
and not reach back.

In 2019, they photographed a black hole
for the first time.

Not the hole itself just the bright ring of light right before it disappears.

That’s what I have of us now.

The glow at the edge.
The last bright thing before you crossed into somewhere I cannot follow.

You think cutting someone off makes it clean.

You think cutting someone off makes it clean?

But black holes don’t erase things.

They change the physics of everything nearby.

You left.

Not because you had to.

Because you decided to.

And the universe didn’t explode.

It just bent.

And I am still learning how to move
in a sky
that carries your missing light.

BUT the event horizon isn’t where something dies.

It’s where the possibility of return
does.

Read my next post here: https://vagueandwordy.blogspot.com/2026/05/orbit.html 

Block Universe and Light Years

Physicists say time is not a river.

Not really.

It only feels that way from inside the boat because we experience life moving forward, and not all at once. 

But somewhere outside of us,

outside the clocks,

outside the calendars,

outside all our little human ways

of measuring everything,

everything exists at once.

Every version of every life.

Every kiss.

Every goodbye.

Every beginning.

Every ending.

Every ordinary Tuesday that later turns out to be sacred.

And if that is true,

then somewhere: 

I am 5 years old... throwing my first baseball, dribbling my first basketball, learning to tie my shoes and ride my bike, having my mom and dad dry me off and hug me after a bath, and feeling my dad lift me into the canvas seat of a hang glider at my first air show. 

I am 23, standing in my first classroom with books in my arms and impossible hope in my chest.

I am 16, being surprised by friends at a Pizza Hut right after learning to parallel park between a brick wall and my dad's temporary walker he has because he broke his leg.

I am 18, starting my first college basketball game, my teammate Rachel by my side as they announce us and we run to mid court before the game while my mom snaps photos immortalizing us because 9 months later Rach hydroplanes and dies two weeks before our sophomore year begins.

I am 36, depressed AF for the first time, wishing I was dead, wishing I had a gun that I'll never own to finish this life on my terms. 

I am 45, losing my job one year before retirement, for reasons I will never know, wishing again someone would take me out of this life because I have never been gut punched so hard in my life.

I am 27, falling in love with a woman, really falling, letting myself go for the first time ever, with anyone.

I am 35 falling asleep in the Alps while my best friend tries to wake me up every 10 minutes to show me the most beautiful peaks on this planet. 

I am 42, swimming with sperm whales, wondering how something so massive, so majestic would let me be their presence. 

I am 38, running my first and only Ironman, 41 finishing Boston, 46.5 retiring, and after all three thanking a god I can't reconcile still to this day for getting me to all of these finish lines, but thanking her I stayed alive to see it all.

Yes.

The universe sighs time a new memory is immortalized, 

as if the universe 

had, 

has, 

will have 

any obligation to us.

Yes.

Somewhere

I am boarding a plane.

Somewhere

I am standing in Senegal wondering how our Western, Christian nationalist nation cannot grasp just how poor the world is.

Somewhere

I am staring at a glacier trying to understand how something can be both ancient and moving.

Somewhere

I am running before sunrise training for a marathon.

Somewhere

I am laughing so hard I cannot breathe, lucky to have the best friends on earth.

And somewhere my dog, every dog I’ve owned, is asleep beside me.

Somewhere

I am dancing in a kitchen with someone who said I'll be with you forever, never leave.

Somewhere

I am kissing someone for the first time, kissing someone for the last time. 

Somewhere...

I am kissing someone for the hundredth time. Pushing her up against the wall, kissing her mouth, her neck, her breasts— yes, every part of her body that she hates but I love because it belongs to her, running my hands all over her gorgeous skin, over and under her clothing before we make love 

as if I have never touched her and made love with her 

but have touched her and made love a thousand times before. 

Somewhere

I am looking across a room and feeling that electric shift when one human being suddenly becomes different from all the others.

Somewhere? She is my now.

Somewhere, she is my past.

Somewhere, she is my future.

She. 

Her. 

Some years she is someone only people who have been single more than with someone understand:

She is ME. Myself. 

Others, my favorite years of course: 

she is someone I didn't, don't, never will get tired of coming home to.

The strange thing is we speak of the past as though it is gone.

The block universe says it isn’t.

What if every beautiful thing still burns exactly where it burned?

What if every version of me still exists where she always existed?

The teacher.

The traveler.

The runner.

The lover.

The woman whose heart is whole, so so full of love.

The woman whose heart is breaking.

The woman who has everything she wants but one thing that keeps eluding her.

The woman who discovers she can survive not getting it.

All of them.

Alive.

At once.

Like stars.

Like rooms in a house so vast I will never reach the end of it.

And maybe that is why certain people never completely leave.

Why certain years still glow and others bring me to tears.

Why some mornings arrive carrying entire lifetimes inside them, 

and why everyone tells me I have lived 5 lives so far.

Because I have. I am. I will.

Because somewhere every conversation is still happening.

Every adventure.

Every sensual touch.

Every laugh that bent me in half.

Every person who changed me.

Every version of me they called into being.

Nothing erased.

Nothing lost.

Just living forever at its own coordinate, own pin in time.

And if the physicists are right,

then somewhere, right now,

I am still becoming.

Still teaching.

Still flying.

Still very very much alive.

Still falling in love.

Still being loved.

Still standing in the middle of a life so beautiful it took me forty-six years to realize:

I was never moving through it.

I was always holding all of it.

Every classroom.

Every mountain.

Every woman.

Every dog.

Every heartbreak.

Every miracle.

Every version of me.

Existing simultaneously

inside this impossible,

glorious,

unbearable but both awe-filled and wonderful thing

we call a life.

Yes.

Still standing in the middle of a life so beautiful it takes decades,

 or perhaps light years,

to understand it was, 

is, 

always will be 

mine.