Soap Box Corner

There are nights when I feel myself dissolving into the dark ocean above, as though some hidden current has lifted me beyond the weight of matter. I don’t fly so much as drift, carried past light itself, unbound by the ordinary pull of time. The stars don’t look like points of fire but like rivers of sparks, spilling from a forge too vast to imagine. Whole galaxies peel open in silence, spirals blooming and vanishing, as if the universe itself were breathing.

The farther I move, the smaller everything becomes. Worlds shrink to dust, suns to pinpricks, and still the view expands. Galaxies thread into filaments, and the filaments into a web so immense it no longer feels like something “out there,” but inward, an anatomy of thought and memory. For a moment, it seems less like distance and more like presence: a living architecture, ancient and awake.

And then comes a widening without edge. Not darkness, not silence, but something formless and radiant, color without spectrum, sound without vibration. It doesn’t appear so much as arrive, not as something I behold but as something that beholds me. In its presence, knowledge feels less like discovery and more like remembering, as if every question I have ever asked is already answered, waiting patiently in a language too vast for words.

Infinity brushes close in these visions, not a number, not a circle, but a pulse without beginning or end. It doesn’t move forward, doesn’t fold back. It spreads in every direction at once, a horizon that recedes even as it draws near. What seems whole fractures into a greater wholeness. What seems final gives way to the next unveiling. To witness it is not to measure, but to surrender.

And yet, the vastness does not swallow me; it refracts me, fracturing my sense of self into shards that float alongside distant suns. Each shard carries a fragment of memory, a whisper of thought, a flicker of longing. In this disassembly, I feel a strange kinship with the stars: neither whole nor absent, but luminous in incompleteness.

Time itself seems to stretch into threads I can pluck, one by one. I reach for them, and they hum under my fingertips, vibrating with questions I have not yet asked. The questions are not mine alone, they belong to the universe, as if it had been storing them in secret, waiting for me to notice. And in noticing, I realize I am not approaching infinity; infinity is approaching me, like water drawn by some hidden current, curling around the contours of my thought, tracing shapes I cannot name.

I try to name it anyway, and the words collapse like fragile bridges. Instead, I leave only gesture: a tilt of the head toward the expanding light, a slow inhale that tastes of ancient galaxies, a pulse measured in the intervals between stars.

Perhaps this is the horizon: not a line at the edge of perception, but a tension, a shimmering between what can be held and what refuses grasp. The cosmos does not demand understanding. It only insists on attention, and on the willingness to float, unmoored, through whatever it chooses to show. And so the thought returns, quiet but insistent: maybe what I see is not apart from me at all. Maybe every glimpse of the vast is only reflection, the universe folding inward to recognize itself. We are the small gazing at the great, and the great slipping quietly through us, an endless recursion, an infinity looking at its own face.