I'm riding in a bus that's half empty, staring out the window at a corn field, watching the rows and rows of corn flicker past like a flip book animation. We drive under a bridge, and for that brief second we're in its shadow, I can see my reflection in the window. And then we're in sunlight again and I can't see my reflection at all.
I left my iPhone at home and told Mom I'd be sleeping at Maddox's house. My dad's backpack full of camping gear rests on the seat beside me.
After an hour ride, we finally arrive in Orillia. The other riders pour out into the parking lot or wait by more bus stops nearby, but I keep walking.
I walk through downtown Orillia. I assume it's downtown because there's a Walmart and Tim Hortons, also the street has two lanes going each way. I keep walking until the franchise stores turn into mom and pop stores. There's a diner, and a bait shop. After thirty minutes of walking, the street turns into one lane each way, and everything is spaced out. Soon, the houses are hidden in the trees and I'm only passing the mouths of long driveways marked with standing mailboxes.
I turn into an unpaved road and trek up it. Gravel crunches at my feet. After an hour of walking the road stops at a dead end, but I keep going, hiking into a field of long yellow grass. I hike an hour or so in this anonymous field that I'm probably not supposed to be in. I keep going until I see nothing in the horizon all around except for trees, open fields, and two cell towers in the distance. I stop and set up camp.
The stars are so much brighter here. The sound of crickets is deafening. I see a faint glow of white behind a band of countless stars stretching across the night sky, and I'm reminded why it's called the Milky Way. I lean back on my camping chair, my toes warm close to the fire at my feet, trying to comprehend the idea that space is infinite.
Can I be looking up, in an infinite loop, and straight back down at myself?
Gazing up, I think about the billions of things up there that I can't see, like the Oort Cloud that surrounds our solar system, or the Oumuamua comet that entered our solar system from Interstellar space and is now traveling way from us, searching for another solar system to visit. I imagine the space debris exploding on Neptune with no one to see it. I imagine the Earth being a pebble to the mountain that is the Sun. And the Sun is a pebble compared to the mountain that is the Pistol Star, light years away. And the Pistol Star is a pebble compared to the mountain that is VY Canis Majoris, the largest star in our galaxy. It takes 100,000 years to travel at the speed of light from one end of our galaxy to the other. Beyond that is 2,500,000 light years of nothingness to the next galaxy. And there are 250,000,000,000 stars in our galaxy, and there are 1,000,000,000 other galaxies in the universe.
I start to think that our lives are small and meaningless.
But then I think that all this knowledge about the universe, and the universe itself, can only be conceived by sentient beings like us. Without us to conceive it, the universe becomes the tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it. The light from other galaxies are traveling billions of light years away to fall onto my eyes. Without us, the universe does not make a sound.
Like someone once said; The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it? I have to believe that when I close my eyes the world is still there.
But maybe it isn't.
YOU ARE READING
The Online Profile of a Teenage Killer
Mystery / ThrillerFrom the 2016 Watty Award winner of "The Online Profile of a Serial Killer", comes Volume 2 of the "Profiles" duology. When someone says that a story is true, it always isn't. But in this case, however, what I'm about to tell you is true. In 2015...
