This was in response to Challenge #37 from The Prose

The basis of the challenge was to write a piece of poetry or prose inspired by or using the following word: Manifest.

I enjoyed writing this little self-told-tale.

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When you look at the cosmos as a whole it’s very hard to honestly order it in your mind. Trust me, I tried for years. 28 to be exact before the incident. Back in the mid ’80s I graduated suma cumlaude from the University of California Berkeley with degrees in astrophysics, theoretical physics and cosmology. Yeah I know I only got through with suma but damn do you have any idea how hard magna would have been across all three majors?

Unrelated can you believe I met a few chicks back in the late 80s who thought my major in cosmology meant I’d ultimately be a writer for that Cosmo Magazine?

Anyway as I was saying, to define the cosmos as vast is analogous to rendering a mathematical value or set of values to infinity. You ever try to “do math” with infinity? It borks the brain man, again you’ll have to trust me.

So back to specifically the stars. I’ve studied the visible cosmos for my entire adult life. So much so that I had memorized the patterns of many of the lesser known oscillations, star clusters and singularities.

But here’s the kicker; Leo, one of the most commonly internationally identified constellations, on June 31st 2012, started moving.

By layman’s terms Leo is made up of nine stars, and as long as humans have looked to the sky, somewhere around 200,000 years now, these stars have obviously never shifted from place. How could a star ‘move’ anyway? Well again that’s another brain squeezer; is every bright body we see when we look up a “sun?” I’m not sure anymore.

I only slept 2-3 hours a night for the six months it took me to fathom that this was truthfully occurring. It was the hardest concept to swallow and I discovered the phenomenon. But I’ll be damned if the nine brightest ‘stars’ didn’t move ever-so-slightly closer together.

It took another eighteen months for the global scientific communities to accept but by that time the convergence was much more obvious and unarguable for even the most headstrong.

This paradox of ‘moving stars’ caused an unprecedented spiritual factor through all of humankind. It was previously hypothesized that a mass extinction event would cause comprehensive strife in the world, however the exact opposite actually happened. As a species we finally discovered our truest commonalities and came to somewhat of a world peace, albeit too late.

I don’t think anyone ever figured out what ‘they’ wanted, the total time it took ‘them’ to get to us, or even who ‘they’ were, but in late 2016 those nine stars combined into a single blinding point and reduced the 7.45 billion of us to less than a guesstimate of a few hundred thousand.

We were forced deep underground in early 2017 so we don’t know if ‘they’ are still up there. By all accounts I’m earth’s last cosmologist and I will most assuredly never see the sky again.

Well I suppose I could fall back on a career in documenting humanity’s second evolution of women’s issues, fashion, and beauty…