It starts at a single point in the void. It fits in a space that defies reasonable measurement. Less than an instant later, it grows to a size half as impossible to rationalise. Eventually (which is to say, immediately after) it fits in your palm … as big as your heart … just barely squeeze inside your head. Towards infinity.

It whizzes by at however many-thousand metres a second, intangibly, invisibly, impossible to ignore. Just behind anything, underneath everything, it spins. For a moment I consider that it all stops, and I get depressed in spite of myself.

I say I’m numb to it now. Overstimulation. But sometimes—rarely—I can notice it. A wave of shock or the crawling rush of time, the wholeness of love, of dancers, of a beach, of an explosion at the start of time and the fade to come.

 It’s violent. It’s scary. It is the Vortex.

 We are in the Vortex. 

*

Energy-dust coalesces, presses into stars that make their first light. Those stars become dust. That light travels further. The dust becomes the sun.

The Big Rip was hypothesised as the end of everything. We thought that the gaps between things, the innumerable gaps between everything—between atoms, between gluon and muon, the gaps that form most of the thing, the nothing we are—would be carried by the increasing expansion of spacetime and drawn so far apart that nothing could ever meet again. A time when closeness is over, a physical impossibility. Where the momentum would propel us (faster! Faster! Faster!) to an effective infinite.

But it was only hypothesised. Momentum carries us elsewhere. Or dissipates altogether. Eventually (which is to say, a functional eternity later than now) all that dust, all those suns, coalesce into singularities. Black holes evaporate, given time. We think.

 I still worry about the Big Rip.

*

I can only see the present from the past. Which is why it’s so hard for me to be here now. Memory is all the past is. Memory and hearsay. The future is an idea; it’s all in our heads. It’s all the Vortex.

In x-billion years our sun will mature and melt the world. The end of the universe, the end of the sun … the world is on track to burn quicker than this. Or we are—like nothing will matter once we die out. Added to the list of extinct mammals. ‘The world is ending!’ they cried. But it isn’t. Just us.

*

How could time be a straight line? At the end of the universe—when everything is settled, collapsed into black holes and evaporated—nothing will change. Maybe not eternally. But for a very, very long time. As far as we know. If nothing changes, does time pass? What does time mean then? Does the Vortex run through time alongside itself? Like an ant in honey, all at once struggling, drowning and drowned.

No point on a straight line is the same as any other. It keeps moving, never returning to where it was. I don’t find that particularly relatable. I’m always changing, though not completely. Not brand-new every second of the day. I have habits. Comforts. Behaviour patterns. I’m always circling back into who I am. I’m not sturdy enough to avoid spiralling. I succumb too easily.

 We’re the world. The wind. The stars. Dancing our rigid, fluid choreography. The shortest path between two points isn’t a straight line, anyway. I’m sure I’ll come back around, as we’ve all done before and will do again. Where am I circling back to?

*

I never miss the feeling of lying in bed, realising how drunk I am. The struggle of returning to sleep’s jealous hold. The alcohol and fatigue flood your head and you try to keep breathing. They’d sooner kill you than share. Maybe it’s the only satisfaction they get. Pick the right time to move from the bed. Dive to the bathroom, frenetic emetic! No, see how long you can prolong it all; if you can get away with it, denying the time at nausea’s easy pace.

There’s no vigil like sleep. When your mouth waters, you really need to go, because apparently your twisting gut and drowning head weren’t enough. The mouth often decides things for the head and stomach.

Once the toilet’s flushed, you suspect some fresh air might do you good, bring you back to life. You roll a cigarette. It’s a rushed job and you’re blinking for far too long at a time. You lick and twist it into shape. The smoke fills you, drowns out your insides. You get the spins but they don’t equal you out spinning the other way. Nothing helps but the flow of time. You see the ‘you’ from tomorrow and hate how lucky they are, but relish the comfort they give you, the promise. Then you puke on the grass, if you’re lucky. You forgot about the cigarette a while ago.

I should stop smoking. I use it to deal with stress, proving beyond a doubt that any real stress would surely kill me. I had a strange feeling the other week that I had trouble articulating. Nothing was numb, but when I’d touch some part of my body, my idea of where it would be felt different from where it was. After days of thinking, I decided that it was like my body had changed overnight but I was still used to the old one. I felt it most on my face and around my head. I’ll go to the doctor. It could have just been a silly thing like bad sleep or undue stress. It’s gone now. The world whirls around me, then slows. The shock of waking revs it up again.

I get spun around. I feel lost, even if I’m not, which makes no difference. And it’s like the Big Rip already happened, like I missed it. My stomach turns and my mouth waters. Everything seems to dance its great, big, secret dance; its own rigid, fluid choreography. Its communion with … what, even? I try not to think that it makes me dizzy to commune in this way. That it makes me vomit. I hope this doesn’t mean anything about me that runs too deep or is impossible for me to understand.

*

Shock keeps you spinning. I’ve felt the shock of disbelief, of being caught, of derealisation, of paralysis. That overload of the nerves, the dry mouth and cold sweat. The shock of ‘there are things that need doing now, so I’ll feel it later.’ The shock of nothing. You might think that resolution is the force that acts against shock, slows it until it stops or maybe loops back in again. But shock ripples across time. You’re still reeling as the catalyst discharges. While the moment that delivers the shock unhelpfully stays with you, stuffed on the same wavelength, even as you sing your tunes of reassurance. Shock lingers. It reverberates within you, adjusting your frequency by microhertz until your body hums a different song.

*

When I watch a dancer, I become aware of each part of the body, how it’s not one whole at all. Supercells swirl. Cyclones purl down the coast. Dervish dresses spin. Inner-ear fluid spins me to sickness. What is a storm, anyway?

Every spread of silk is woven; each strand moves together. But perhaps to consider them individually is a mistake. There’s always the illusion of individuality and the loneliness that follows. Perhaps there isn’t the tide lapping at a hundred-thousand-million grains of sand, just a pretty beach. The tides of time lap at and sink the sand in an hourglass. Or is that just the beach again? The dancers aren’t people with worries or places to be after this performance, no—they’re the motion, the show, the feeling, the ocean.

There aren’t the people from then and the people now. There isn’t inside or outside or from the top or bottom or observed or unseen. Or there are—it’s a matter of scale. But even that’s all the same.

*

You don’t always know it, but there’s a moment with anyone you love where the particles of attraction hurtle into each other and ignite. This doesn’t have to be sexual, and sex mostly isn’t where the sun is made anyway. It might be where the son is made, but you’ve had that talk already. That moment, whenever it was, happens. It happens once for the first time and keeps happening if you’ve struck gold. Maybe you have an idea of when it was. Maybe you’ll know. I think there’s only a best guess.

There’s also their moment with you. They might be right in front of your face or on the other side of the world. Their best guess might be right. It’s all just memory. Maybe neither of you will ever know when the first time was. When you look at each other and love just as deeply, together. When you hold hands and all the light of the universe fits inside your hearts and your heads as the shine explodes out from behind their eyes. It can be hard to admit when that moment was. Easy for some. But, however dark or distant, the haze of affection becomes shining devotion. The crush becomes a stellar collapse.

There is a time when you don’t know them. When they’re wandering around, living their life before you, doing things you’ll learn about later. Making mistakes, loving other people. Maybe you’ll both love other people later. And it will be a more mature love, so you’ll question if the love you have now was ever even real love. But it was. It is.

Love can make you stupid. It will make you stupid. Your head will swim, your stomach will twist, and your mouth will turn against you. That’s love too, at the risk of being too liberal with the word. But being liberal with love can’t be the worst thing.

You’ll both come apart in tiny ways and loop around again, curling closer. The sun’s a valuable thing here, in the Vortex.

*

It takes less than a minute for your blood to return to your heart. It takes longer than that to bring your heart back from someone who once held it. Both are the speed of the Vortex. Frightfully big and fast and small and fragile and forever.

The Vortex is violent. The Vortex is scary. The Vortex fits in your palm, your heart, your head. It spreads the weave of space further at the boundary of the cosmos into the great nothing out there.

You can’t be swallowed or spat out. It can feel like it, which, to be fair, might as well make it real. Even then, the fusion of hydrogen into helium and the supernova dust will come. It’s all fine. We’re okay. Or will be. Or were. But it’s all the same, isn’t it?

The lover circles his own heart,

on a homeward, spinning run.

We are in the Vortex.

Dust becomes the sun.