Into the Void
The Vastness of Space, The Vastness of Grief
I was seven years old when I learned about black holes. Thinking about these massive portals to nothingness made it impossible to sleep. I understood very little about them, only that they were huge and inescapable. They were my first tangible symbols of the great beyond—real-world, concrete metaphors for death itself.
The above video by YouTuber Spds is a nearly twenty-minute dive into three things the creator says make space terrifying. The video discusses the sheer enormity of space, the horror of the void, and the theory of Time Decay. The YouTube algorithm loves to throw this sort of content at me from time to time. Perhaps it’s my interest in cosmic horror. Or perhaps it wants to remind me that my problems aren’t terribly significant in the scope of things.
Most likely, it was dictated by something that I watched before (probably this one).
I’m no astrophysicist, not even an armchair one. I’m a storyteller, so my understanding of space is on a purely aesthetic and metaphorical level. I appreciate it as a reminder of how little we as a species understand. An outer representation of inner chaos. A thing of beauty and terror and possibility.
YouTube at times feels as vast (and as maddening) as space itself. My subscriptions are numerous, but even they only represent as small fraction of the site—a star system, if you will. The algorithm sends new content by creators I haven’t heard of into my orbit occasionally, but even these videos are at least tangentially related to either my subscriptions or phrases that I’ve previously typed into the search bar. And again, these seemingly stray objects are not a true representation of how much content is truly on YouTube.
What’s striking (and sometimes unsettling) is how tailored the content that I receive is. How well this algorithm knows me. In that respect, it’s less chaotic than space. Every once in a while, though, it throws me something I didn’t expect just to remind me how vast it is, how much I’m missing. Perhaps, it’s also meant as a reminder that it, not me, is in control. That it knows me better than I know myself.
It almost makes black holes seem less frightening.
Seventeen years ago today, I lost a friend to suicide. He was the guitarist in my band and a roommate. He was an asshole at times but also a source of strength, inspiration, and companionship. Our music was dark and heavy, but it was fun to play. To paraphrase Phantasm, his death was a hell of a way to break up a band. In the years since, my relationship to music has been touch and go. While the joy and catharsis I get from listening to music has never gone away, creating and playing music has always carried a bittersweetness to it in the years since his death.
In the immediate aftermath, I spent months alone, playing keyboard in my room, composing songs and trying to make sense of an encroaching nihilism. For a decade, I started and abandoned various musical projects with others. Whenever something fizzled out, I told myself it was because I was focusing more on writing books and didn’t have time for music, but the truth was it was too painful to work with others. I started singing karaoke because it was a safe way to have a musical outlet without attachment. And one day, I just stopped altogether, becoming solely a consumer of music and not a creator. I missed it, but I told myself that I no longer needed it because my life was different.
I was lying, of course.
The void comes for us all. Even if you’re a person of faith, you can’t deny it. Even if you’re correct and there is something beyond that crushing darkness, well, Boote’s Void is 330 million light years across. That’s 330 million years without light. Utter blackness for a time period our minds can hardly fathom.
Sounds like depression to me—the Bleak Season, in which everything is cold and dark. Unending and infinite, at least from where you’re standing. It’s enough to shake even the strongest of faiths. To snap the most stable of minds. To bring someone to swap a conscious void for the void of dreamless sleep.
(I told you I like space as a metaphor.)
I miss the fucker. Even though I don’t know if we’d still be friends, I miss him.
I dream of him sometimes. In these dreams, his suicide was either an elaborate prank, or it happened in a separate timeline. He’s still the same as he was then, but I am the me of now. Evolved. Somewhat more mature. Dare I even say, “happy?”
Thanks to a friend, making music is a part of my life again. My current collaborator is also an author, so he understands when that takes precedence. We’re also both parents to young children, so for both of us, family comes before all of it.
I don’t know what the point of this newsletter is. Unlike most writers on Substack, I don’t go into these with a thesis in mind. What I do know is this: one word in front of the other makes sense; one day at a time makes each day eternal; and the void trembles at music played in a certain key, with the right amount of intention and level of passion.
When I stare across the void now, I can see no stars, but I know they’re there. I’ve been here before, and I know the only way out is through.
Happy Monday.