Vic
I laid on the ground and followed the clouds with my eyes as they traveled above us and morphed into different shapes and sizes, when I thought about it harder there's no such thing as two clouds that take the same shape, size, or weight... they are constantly changing, and breaking into pieces, accumulating other broken pieces of clouds to make an almost entirely new one, just to get broken and rebuilt again and again.
He held his hand over my face, placing the joint right in my view, I reached up and grabbed it from between his finger and thumb and brought it back down to my lips and took a drag. I let my head roll over to see David was already waiting for me to notice, his big brown eyes staring back into mine as I smiled at him and passed the joint back to him, watching as he took a hit. His brown hair laying back out of his face, showcasing how unfairly long his eyelashes are and the freckles that sat on his forehead and scattered around his cheeks. His cheeks glowed pink and he looked back up at the sky and we sat in a comfortable silence for a while longer smoking.
"Ya know what's really insane to me?" He asked as he passed to me and I raised my eyebrows and looked back to the clouds. "Have you heard of the Fermi Paradox?" He asked.
"I have no idea what that is."
"Well, it's basically just... if the probability of life is so high, then... where is everyone?"
"What do you mean?"
"Theres around one billion galaxies in space, each one with billions and billions of stars... that leaves such a huge probability that theres trillions of planets that are habitable like earth. Think about it, when you think of space all you really think about is our galaxy, which in itself is bigger than anybody really realizes, but also just a tiny tiny tiiiiny speck in the massive scale that is all of space. So... where is everyone else? Why haven't we been able to find anybody?" He glanced at me and then back at the sky.
"You're high." I stated and we both erupted in laughter.
"Yeah, maybe..."
"I guess the better question is... why hasn't anybody been able to find us?"
"If you think about it, the first time we got radio waves to leave earth was in like, the late 1800's I think, which means that on a galactic scale our planet has only been making noise for... like a fraction of millisecond." Not gonna lie, everything he just said went over my head.
"Galactic scale?" I asked and he rolled his head to the side and looked at me.
"Ya know, with relativity and the speed that light travels... when we look through space... when we're even just looking at the stars at night, we are also looking back in time. By seeing an object 1 billion light-years away, we are also seeing how that object looked 1 billion years ago. So when you're looking at a star, you're looking at that star but 1 billion years ago."
"So... it's not actually the star I'm looking at, it's the light from that star that took 1 billion years to travel here..." it made me think of when Harry brought me to the roof of that hotel in Milan so I could see the full moon.... When he covered my eyes and made me imagine the stars. That was my favorite part of my time while traveling, I got to see the stars and chase the moon from the window of the car, and pull over just to stop and look whenever I wanted... but my favorite was when I got to go home. I went to the place me and my dad used to go to look at the stars, it was a Sunflower field, but since the flowers only bloom for a few months, it's just a big field for the rest of the year and we would go there during full moons, and lay in the grass and stare at the stars.
"So, on the galactic scale, like I said, our planet has barely made any noise since the late 1800's when we started being able to send our radio waves, because of the speed that light and sound travel, we've barely even made much of a whisper as of right now. So, if we've barely even made a splash in our galaxy, imagine all the other planets, in their galaxies, billions of light years away that we probably won't even know about until long after we've died." If I'm being honest, I'm still not 100% full understanding all the details of what he's saying, but watching how his face lights up when he notices that I'm engaged, and when I ask the right question is what I'm more mesmerized by, and watching his hand gestures extended out in front of us made me smile. "So, ya know the movie 'Horton Hears a Who'?" He asked and I nodded. "So basically, we're just a speck, on a flower, on a speck on a flower, in a field of millions and millions of flowers, all with their own specks." He said and he rolled his head back to look back at the sky.
"It's scary to think about how.... Insignificant everything is in the grand scheme of things." I said and he hummed in response.
"Tell me about that." He said softly and I sighed.
"Well, we live on this massive planet with 7 billion other people, who all lead totally different lives, have a totally different 'normal' and have a routine all of their own, like... that super tall guy that sits in the back, he does equipment stuff.... I think. Anyways, his name is Evan, I've never actually had a full conversation with him. I see him everyday, greet him every morning, spend hours a day, everyday, 20 feet away from him.... But nothing I do in my life will likely cross his, other than that we work together. He has his own networks of relationships, his own routine, his own family, place to live, friends, wife maybe... and I have no idea. We spend our entire lives living to just... get by. But at the end of the day... we are all just tiny little moments in someone's life, someone you don't even think twice about. People die, and they leave, and you get new jobs, move towns, or cities, or states, and just.... Move on. What's the point of hanging on to all of these draining emotions and relationships when at the end of the day, you just get over it.... You have to." I said and I saw him out of the corner of my eye turn his head to me. I looked at him and he raised your eyebrows.
"Who fucked you over so bad?" He asked in a half joke and I chuckled and shook my head.
"Oh shut up, I'm just saying. In the grand scheme of things all of these little things that seem so huge and so...suffocating, are really just insignificant. Life moves on." We kept our eye contact a little longer before I looked away and shrugged it off. "How do you know so much about all of this anyway?" I asked and he chuckled a little.
"My dad is an astronomer. He used to be the coolest one at career day in school." He said and laughed. "I first got into photography because of my dad, he taught me how he photographed and charted the stars, he had a whole little set up in the spare room. He had all his stuff, his telescopes, maps, graphs, you name it. So, once I learned how, I started practicing photographing the stars and the moon and one year for my birthday, I used all my chore money and my birthday money to get my first camera. But I used to hang out in my dad's "space room", as I called it, and he would work out loud, and show me all the constellations and the planets we could see."
"That sounds really special." I said, picturing a small David sitting next to his dad while he showed him the constellations on the map and then in the sky made me smile, I can only imagine the excitement he would get.
"Yeah, it was. What about your dad? I love a good 'dad story'." He said and laughed at his own statement and I chuckled with him and shook my head before grabbing my phone from beside me and holding it over my face.
"Looks like our lunch break is over. Come on, let's go slacker." I said and I sat up and pushed myself off the ground, I brushed myself off and extended my hand to David. He sat up and grabbed my hand, pushing himself up and standing in front of me. He kept a soft grip on my hand and looked at me for a moment and I could feel the butterflies erupt in my stomach. "Right, so-" I said and slipped my hand out of his and leaned over to grab my bag from the grass.
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Hello hello!!!!
I told y'all I was gonna make it up to for being so MIA, so here's a whole lot of updates ;)))))
anyway!!!!
I got the idea for this chapter from a tiktok I saw earlier today talking about The Fermi Paradox and I had to look into a little more and I thought it was so interesting.
Anyway, keep your eyes peeled ;)
All the love
-r
YOU ARE READING
The Photographer - h.s
FanfictionI know that you're scared because I'm so open Photographs are beautiful and ageless, because even after the memories have passed and the people have changed, you can look back... and for a moment- a split second, everything is exactly the way it wa...
