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Thursday, December 15, 2011

Paramour, Part 5


Paramour





As Paramour and I got back on our way, sailing the endless reaches of space, I took up a ukelele I had picked up on the ruins of earth. While stars, galaxies and novas passed us by, I learned Israel Kamakawiwoole’s “Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World” blend and played it for Paramour and myself as we glided through a colorful universe. Paramour would bounce and weave to the beat, waving his tail in time to the music.

During our excursions through cosmic anomalies and oddities, Paramour noticed the growing prevalence of black holes and the continuing expansion of the universe. As years passed us by, the lights of the heavens began to dim as entropy was approached. Stars would scatter their ashes far and wide, but failed to give birth to new stars; galaxies began to lose their glow as their stars died, and fell into the voracious black holes that were ever more present in the universe. Paramour and I were troubled by this, mainly because all of our favorite vacationing spots were being eaten by greedy gravitational anomalies. But it also troubled us because it appeared as if the universe moving towards a cold, dark, and cataclysmic death.


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The time finally came when the universe ended, the fabric of reality stretching and ripping, yet at the same time collapsing in on itself. Paramour and I watched as galaxies unraveled, slinging stars everywhere, and planets went careening around as the laws of the universe threw in the towel and gave up. Enormous black holes sucked in matter like obese American children feeding off consumer culture, while white holes, whose existence Paramour had proved and smugly rubbed in my face, spat out that same material like stubborn partisan politicians refusing to compromise and accept new concepts in order to reach any sort of solution. For a short time, the universe played Pong with its stars, and Mario the plumber, on his off shift, fought the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who was evidently real. GLaDOS got a taste of her own medicine as she was endlessly thrown through black and white holes, while Schrodinger’s cat got out of its box and clawed up the laws governing its existence. As can be expected, the Cheshire Cat also showed up, briefly reveling in the chaos and uncertainty before disappearing again. In the absence of the laws of physics, the laws of poetry briefly took over, forcing everyone to hedge their sentences in iambic pentameter. After massive protest, the regulations were switched to free verse, allowing everyone to scream, albeit poetically, about the end of the universe. The angels in heaven fretted as everything fell to pieces, but God assured them that all was well, and this was the promised Apocalypse. Christ wryly remarked that it was about time, while the Holy Ghost, in his guise as Death, flew about the galaxy, collecting souls for the final judgement.

As the universe came to an end, all the greatest bands, led by Coldplay, sang their final farewells to the reality they knew before the Flying Dutchman took them to heaven. Huge reality chasms appeared, devouring everything. The stars and basic elements of the universe were drawn into the chasms, which finally merged into a lone singularity that devoured everything, including thoughts. The Paramour was drawn into the reality chasm, and in the moment before we fell in, I thought I saw, in letters as big as light-years, the word Facebook scrawled all across the chasm.

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Paramour and I fought hard to keep our ship from falling into the singularity, but it’s pretty hard when it’s a reality chasm, consuming all of reality, which you may or may not be stuck in. As we were drawn into the void, black as the blackest black, I thought I heard the angels gasp, while God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost said, “Oops. . . looks like we forgot a couple.”

Unable to escape the pull of the reality chasm, I hung onto the helm of the Paramour as Paramour the cat clung to my shoulder, both of us grimly facing down the end of the universe. As we slid into the reality chasm, we hit turbulence, for which American Airlines can probably be blamed. Darkness enveloped us, but not really; there wasn’t light, but somehow we could still see color, even though all around us was dark. As the reality chasm closed on us, having eaten everything in the universe, both of us lost consciousness.

1 comment:

  1. My favorite part yet. Especially loved the laws of poetry and everyone speaking in iambic pentameter, hahaha.

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