We live in a spiral.
Not a metaphorical one, though those are everywhere, but a literal, galactic spiral. The Milky Way, a flattened whirl of stars and dust, spinning in the dark. Gravity holds it together, barely. It’s wide and thin, stretched like a dying thought across nothing. And in this spiral, on a rock small enough to forget, we exist. Temporarily.
It’s funny, the stories we tell ourselves about this. We call it home. We draw maps of it like it’s a neighborhood. We give it names, assign coordinates, pretend like it cares we’re here. But the spiral isn’t for us. It doesn’t know we exist. It doesn’t need us. It simply is an accident of motion, matter, and the slow mathematics of collapse.
And beyond that spiral, beyond its thinning arms and cold gas, there is the void. Not a poetic one the real one. The intergalactic darkness. The nothing between somethings. A vacuum so complete it makes silence feel loud. No light, no heat, no structure. Just distance so vast it stops being distance at all. Time dies out there. So does meaning.
We look at that void and panic. So we build religions. We invent destiny. We chase legacy. We write stories about chosen ones and final purposes and eternal loves. All to avoid admitting what’s obvious: the universe doesn’t care. It doesn’t even notice. There’s no message hidden in the stars, no divine whisper waiting to be decoded. There is no center. There is no edge. Just the slow winding down of everything that ever was.
And yet we feel. We ache. We want. Somewhere in the spiral, a few atoms started dreaming of forever. We touch each other with shaking hands and pretend it means more than survival. We search for God in our reflection, for hope in someone else’s eyes, for permanence in a universe built entirely on decay.
Maybe that’s all we are: a brief, flickering resistance to entropy. A protest made of skin and breath. A quiet scream echoing inside a spiral that never asked for us in the first place.
Still, we keep looking up. Still, we keep naming the stars.
Still, we keep loving as if it matters.
And maybe that, too, is enough.
Black Holes Whispering in Tongues 