BLACK HOLE (OR/OF) GRIEF

My understanding of a black hole--which is a hazy, non-scientist understanding, so take it for what it's worth--is that they're an exponentially intensified version of a diamond. Take coal and add pressure you get a diamond. Now add more pressure to that diamond. Now add more pressure. Add so much pressure that atoms are condensed, gravity drawing all matter in squeezing the living daylights out of it all.

There is a theory that black holes create universes. They act as a forge, spinning at unimaginable speeds trapping and wrapping matter up into a tiny seed particle which explodes on the other side of the black hole as a new universe. (1)

Once I had my heart break, only it didn't feel like breaking. It felt as though it was being tightly squeezed, painfully so. 

I imagine grief as a black hole, beginning as the heart is squeezed in an invisible fist of the irreversible weight of an ending, causing the collapse of the heart and drawing everything within range into the swirling blackness. For a while you wear the event horizon around you like a painful crown, you watch as everything you treasured, hoped for, dreamed of, and once were spins, torn from their place in the heavens where they should be. Then you are left on the other side of a one way door in a new universe. What will it be? Are there no familiar constellations to guide your ship by? Are there no ships? Would it be better to not remember as you walked into this new world?

I read Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, because I saw this quote from it, "When we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all." I felt that painful heart squeeze for a person who was living and gone and for several people who were dead, whom I had felt die and then seen them picked out of the car and off the road and placed gently into the back of a pickup truck parked in the middle of a highway in Paraguay. It was for that I read Year of Magical Thinking. It was for the person who I was six years ago who couldn't stop seeing and feeling all those moments and aching painfully over the living and the dead. For that person who had no strength of will to go, to stretch, or to push herself. And for the girl she had been.

Grief is a beautiful awful thing.


(1) http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/02/140218-black-hole-blast-explains-big-bang/
(Another basic resource on black holes) http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/what-is-a-black-hole-k4.html