I woke up this morning with the familiar weight on my chest—the kind that isn’t quite sadness, isn’t quite fear, but feels like gravity has been turned up a notch just for me. Coffee didn’t help. Neither did the news. What stayed with me was a question so vast that it made everything else feel insubstantial: where did all of this come from?
Not the country. Not the century.
The universe.
I keep trying to picture the beginning, and my mind rebels. A bang implies space to bang into. An expansion implies something expanding within. But space itself is the thing we’re talking about, and the language breaks down the moment you lean on it too hard. It’s like trying to describe silence using only noise.
What is space, really?
Is it a thing, or the absence of things? Is it a fabric, as the physicists like to say, or just a convenient word for the distance between objects we don’t fully understand? When I stare at the night sky, I don’t feel awe the way I’m supposed to. I feel vertigo. The stars don’t comfort me; they interrogate me.
And then there’s the most unbearable question of all: Does space end?
If it does, what’s behind it? A wall? Another kind of space? A void so absolute it makes our universe feel like a rounding error? Every answer seems to smuggle in another “where,” another hidden assumption that there must be something instead of nothing. Our brains evolved to navigate savannas and grocery stores, not infinities. Maybe that’s the real cruelty of consciousness—we can ask questions our minds are structurally incapable of answering.
Sometimes I imagine reaching the edge. No stars, no light, just a final horizon where the rules quietly stop applying. I imagine pressing my hand against whatever boundary exists there and feeling… what? Resistance? Cold? Meaning? Or nothing at all. And if there truly is nothing beyond it, then what contains that nothing? The thought loops until it feels like standing between two mirrors, watching yourself recede forever.
This is where the existential crisis sneaks in—not as panic, but as erosion. If the universe has no center, no edge, no intention, then what exactly are we doing here, filing taxes and arguing online? If everything that ever was or will be exists in a structure that might itself be a statistical accident, what does significance even mean?
And yet—this is the part that keeps me from fully unraveling—I’m here asking the question. The universe, whatever it is, has produced something capable of wondering about its own origin. Atoms learned to think. Space bent itself into a mind that can feel dread at the thought of endless space.
Maybe meaning isn’t something we discover beyond the edge.
Maybe it’s something that happens briefly, locally, absurdly—inside fragile creatures who look up at the dark and refuse to stop asking.
Tonight I’ll probably lie awake again, staring at the ceiling, trying to imagine the unimaginable. I won’t succeed. But the attempt itself feels like a kind of prayer—addressed to no one, answered by nothing, and somehow still necessary.
If the universe has an end, I don’t know what’s behind it.
But I know this: for a moment, in this vast and possibly infinite expanse, we are here. And we are wondering. And maybe that has to be enough—for now.