vasilios moschouris

The first time I am afraid to die I am eight years old on a warm spring night, looking up into the night sky through a high-powered telescope at a great blue haze that my teacher says is the Andromeda galaxy. It is distant now, but he says that Andromeda is approaching our galaxy, and one day the two will collide, and Andromeda will consume the Milky Way. I ask him if this is true; the blue haze through the lens of the telescope doesn’t look like it could consume anything, I think. It looks like a piece of the sky seen through mountain fog. Even at eight I know he sees my fear. It’s alright, he tells me, it’s very far away, there’s no need to be scared. It will take Andromeda many, many years to get here. And by the time it does, we will already be dead.

***

I wake the next morning, and the next, and the next, and Andromeda is still coming. The blue haze fills my mind like smoke as the days trickle by; I try to imagine the day it will arrive: what will it be like on Earth, the day when the fog through the lens becomes a storm, when great arms of stars collide in the sky? When I close my eyes and picture it, all I can conjure is a memory: the Fourth of July. A black summer sky, filled with fireworks.

Four billion years until Andromeda arrives, and I am still eight years old, sitting in a classroom bathed in sterile, fluorescent light, watching a video of what our sun would look like if it were consumed by a black hole—unraveled and swallowed like a spaghetti strand. I learn that nothing, not even light, can escape these terrifying things. I learn that they are born when stars die, and that there is one of them at the center of every galaxy, slowly swallowing creation. I learn that the Milky Way’s is twenty-one billion times larger than the sun in our sky, and I cannot comprehend this. I think instead of the whirlpool that always forms above the drain of the bathtub, a perfect circle at the center of everything—all-consuming, given time.

I wonder what will happen when Andromeda comes, and the two supermassive black holes collide. They can’t consume each other, because a black hole is nothing, and nothing plus nothing equals nothing. As I attempt to wrap my mind around this conundrum, I suddenly understand how my calculator feels when I divide by zero, and all it can say is ERROR.

***

The Milky Way drains into its black hole. Andromeda’s pace is steady, and undeniable. It is night again, and I’m looking at the stars. In class today, we learned that many of the stars in our sky might be long dead; their light takes so long to reach our eyes through the void that by the time we see them, they are already gone. I wonder if one day I will look and find one missing—consumed or collapsed, it wouldn’t matter; it would be gone, and there would be nothing left to see.

As I look up at the stars and the space between them, I try to imagine death. My mind strains, and all it can conjure is a blue haze, and a black hole. Nothing plus nothing. ERROR. Though the night is warm, I shudder.

Today, we also learned about the sun.

Our sun is too small to become a black hole. As it begins to die, it will swell up and consume the Earth, the moon, and all the planets closest to it. There’s no need to be scared of this, of course; we will already be dead.

Then it will become a white dwarf, like a log becomes a smoldering coal. And when even that last remnant of its fire dies, it will turn so black as to be indistinguishable from the space around it. But it will not become a black hole. It will not become nothing.

Somehow the thought of this lightens the pressure of the emptying sky above me, and the distant blue haze beyond. The thought that maybe, when Andromeda comes, when the two great nothings collide, and when all the stars are gone from the sky, there will still be something left.