Sleepless at the Event Horizon

Poem

By Victoria Ashleigh Rose

The space-time continuum,

General relativity

The universe is expanding but not growing.

It’s impossible to sleep with the world at the edge of my screen.

ChatGPT has the collective reservoir of human intelligence

and I can learn just by asking.

Curiosity is a ghost in our school system,

A soft, suffocated thing.

They teach answers instead of wonder.

But wonder is what keeps me awake.

And I have entire fantasy worlds

stacked in my head like unturned pages,

unwritten, unmade,

demanding space in a universe

already bursting at the seams.

And the sun is rising.

And I don’t even really understand how.

The day moves forward,

and we are three-dimensional beings

enslaved to the fourth.

Free will stops at the gates of time:

no skipping ahead,

no rewinds,

no pause.

Anything to buy a little more—

but time is not for sale.

At least, not to us.

Our attention is a commodity and the rich cash in

but I am not one of them.

I am a finite resource.

And the sun rises again,

And my eyes set on the event horizon

where everything is happening,

and I never quite sink into the timeless pit,

—the chaos of indiscovery and non existence—

the black hole where my time is splurged away like my money on starbucks coffee;

a currency exchange for sleeplessness and day dreams.

The battle between my pine-eal gland and my brain stretches across dimensional plains,

a rock and a hard place,

a resource or a regenerative state.

A cycle of collapse and creation…

Maybe sleep is what black holes are to space.

A rest from the laws of physics,

a break from ever expanding,

The demand for life, movement, light, gravity.

To fight off sleep

—to live on the event horizon—

is to see the allure of collapse,

to stand at the edge of falling,

to witness the teeming cosmos,

Stars and galaxies,

And to bend time, to pause it, corrupt it

just to not fall in,

just to hold on

to every last

second.