My Friend Mia

I imagined myself dangling on the edge of a black hole quite often, I indulged quite a bit in my imagination and nothing was quite as stimulating for me as quantum physics. As I sat there on my bed, dripping ketchup and honey mustard on my sheets, I imagined that I was in that thin, thin space before a black hole, just falling inward amongst the other fallen stars and asteroids.

You see, this film of space before a black hole’s center is, to me, even more fascinating a place than the center of a black hole. That is to say that we already know what’s at the center of a black hole, just plain old gravity- at its finest. But when you’re swirling around a black hole, when you are not spaghettified just yet (which is a real term, by the way), before you’ve been smashed by absolute gravity you are just…there, being seduced by the force of gravity until you meet your final destiny at a black hole’s center.

Some stars don’t take very long to travel through this space, to be sucked into the center of a black hole. Some stars can glide along for four of five billion years before they are sucked in. the thing both have in common, though, is their destiny.

Time, in a black hole, does not exist because it has been replaced by gravity. Time, in the space that orbits around a black hole, is being slowly and slowly withered away, but at a different rate for each particle depending on how eager the matter is to give into the temptation of the gravity at the center of a black hole.

My addiction, my insatiable desire to be thin and to taste the food in front of me was a black hole. And I felt so alone so often, just in this orbit around the center of the black hole and with no idea just how long I must stay in orbit, no idea how long I would feel alone on my bed for so many afternoons and evenings. It seemed that my destiny was to be sucked in. after all, what other fate could exist?