Hubble Ultra Deep Field image. S. Beckwith & the HUDF Working Group (STScI), HST, ESA, NASA

He held her in a tight squeeze. The voice of a blind, mute Mexican woman saddened everything around them. The Spanish song soaked the air with such hopeless misery and dejection that if you held up your hand and squeezed your fist, tears would flow from it. Waves of loss radiated from the mute singer and became thick, continuous sounds. What a fount of sorrow she was. A gushing release such as this should empty the most sodden heart, but she had truly known sorrow. Who knew if she was mute or if her words imploded into silence with their own terrible gravity. Her empty voice rose and became towering, tottering waves of anger, rage, regret, regret, regret. Tch. And regretfully they crashed, impotent, limp, pleading and blaming on two pairs of ears.

He held her tighter. She hung on to him for life. “I’m scared,” she said. He knew why she was scared. The sadness filled the cosmos, and she thought she was drowning. There was infinity around her. But he knew better than her. They had drowned and survived. They were immune.

They turned their heads, and simultaneously the universe swung around sharply, and they were falling down in every direction at a monstrous speed. Everything seemed still. Thousands of violins and thousands of cellos struck up a vicious orchestra. She cast about in the blackness to spot the musicians, but saw no one because the music was being played on the taut hairs on the back of her neck. But she had made the mistake of looking around. Stretched out in more directions than she could comprehend, illuminating the silhouette of a man and woman holding each other’s hand, laughing a subliminal babble, was the infinite universe. Stars scattered and arrayed themselves in cosmic discipline wherever they looked. On vast murals were laid out unfolded stories. Their denouement had unmasked the sham of their erstwhile tight constraints. Every life lay deflated. There was no direction, nothing to seek, no differences, nothing small, nothing separate, no thought, no importance, no enjoyment, no understanding, no process. All these nothings, as they hurtled crazily through open, bottomless space.

This scared even the man. They were too frozen by shock to hold on to each other anymore. Their hands parted, they started drifting. They had to understand. But everything was around them, and everything was senseless. They both grappled with being unmoored, tried to still themselves, tried to hold on, tried to grasp, tried to fathom. But the vacuum slipped out of their clutching hands. There was only apprehension, for there was none. What to understand?

As involuntarily as they had parted, their hands met again. Like tendrils, they immediately sought out and grew into one another. Clutched each other with relieved desperation. They sank into one another. There was nothing else to grasp.

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