Lines and Circles

Author : Philip G. Hostetler

Somewhere along the line I drew a circle instead. I thought about it. When thinking in linear terms, does the line break on through to the other side to terminate at the beginning? If so, does it differ at all from a circle, the enigmatic snake biting it’s tail? All a matter of perspective, purely subjective really… But I believe they are one and the same. How so? How can something so different in appearance and direction have the exact same properties? Faith, baby, Faith.

Yeah, I said it, the ‘F’ word. Dirty as fuck, I know, but consider the limited faculty of human senses that are conditioned to the earthly experience. Then consider that if we could perceive the Gamma and X-Ray spectrum we’d be able to witness celestial events, grand explosions, the birth of stars and the degradation of energy. Now imagine your perception is invulnerable, completely resistant to entropy, which is what I’m getting at. Imagine all matter has been broken down to heat, pure heat. You’re there witnessing it, like a cosmic voyeur, not of the universe but suspended at the third person. You’ve seen it all, the formation, the progression and resulting diversity. The spontaneity of life erupting onto hydrated spheres of mass in that perfect goldilocks zone. Not too hot, not too cold- but just right. Ah the neutral zone, the balance…

So what the fuck does this have to do with Maggie Hubbard?

Everything. For she is the circle and I am the line. Here we are suspended, witnessing heat death and a big bang. Of course this was all before we decided to go spelunking into black holes. Not somewhere anyone wants to be really, witnessing your body stretching and tearing apart into base carbon, hydrogen and then concentrated amongst the orgy of elements at the center of a singularity is truly a harrowing experience, let me tell you…

But she’s so beautiful and I’d follow her anywhere, although by jumping into a black hole we never come back quite the same.

I digress, Maggie, oh Maggie, why did we ever leave the goldilocks zone? Why did we rise so far from grace? There we were, happily crawling on our bellies in the filth and muck of the earth, and now we’ve come to such great heights beyond ourselves that our selves are barely recognizable, save for the devotion to the basest elements and our fucked up ability of disembodied consciousness. Go anywhere, be anything, have the experience of any and all matter, for we’re all one and the same. So why are there two of us? That’s still got me all fucked up. I know we’re all one and the same so why does this disembodied consciousness require a pair? Every time we laid down to have Dr. MacArroy break our bodies down until all that remained was a massless wisp of consciousness and project us to various locations around the universe, he said it was absolutely necessary to have two linked souls. Oh, and he paid, he paid well… Every time we came back our bank accounts were burgeoning with digits, some kind of government grant to explore the potential of the human brain or… …whatever. Funny how that shit doesn’t matter when you’ve experienced the simultaneous beginning/end of the fucking universe. Fuck off money, I was a happy laborer, I manipulated earthly materials into humanoid living structures. All right, I was just a fucking carpenter- what do you want from me? Put this kind of knowledge into a layman’s head and see what the fuck happens. A convoluted, disjointed recount of eternity.

Maggie… Where the fuck have you gone? Never has Dr.MacArroy mentioned anything about the abyss. Is that really the only word? The void? The abstract nothing? The unimaginable? Is that where you’ve gone? As if to answer, your hand emerged as if from nothing. I grasped your hand and I pulled, I pulled harder than a singularity. I pulled with love. But now there is a darkness in your eyes. A darkness. As Dr. MacArroy said,
“Once the Circle is drawn, the Circle is gone.”