THE VISION IS A PLACE | ✓ {complete}

Chapter 34 - will you tell me about the book again?

When the sun had set, and the afterglow on the horizon slowly drowned beneath the skyline, more and more lights started to appear in the distance, just like he said they would.

Still sitting at the fire with my sleeping bag over my legs, I followed the ashes up to the sky, watching the little red specs blend into the stars before fading to black. Eventually Addison looked away from the city lights and started watching the ashes, too.

"How many stars do you think are up there?" I asked.

He was silent for a second. "Has anyone ever given you a good answer to that? One you liked?"

"No. Not really."

"I don't think it's a number we're supposed to know," he said, nearing a whisper.

It's funny how looking at the sky can make you do that; make you whisper. The same way walking through an old growth forest, or entering a really beautiful church, can make you whisper.

"Maybe we're supposed to just feel it," I said, looking up, past the silhouettes of naked, wiry branches.

"What does it feel like to you?"

"Like swimming in really deep water."

"Yeah?"

"Like that...but knowing it'll end soon...and not knowing whether, when it's over, you'll just...float into the sky, or sink to the bottom."

"I hear that," he whispered.

I looked away from the sky, and back to him.

He looked at me without saying anything for awhile. Then asked, "Do you think the universe is infinite?"

"I really want it to be."

"...Me too," he said, in a way that made me think he wanted it for the same reasons I did. "At the commune, when me and Heath were little, my dad, whenever we were acting out, he'd make us lay out in this massive field that was between our house and the forest at the base of the mountain, and he'd give us a question—one that couldn't be answered. He'd tell us not to come back unless we either made up a story to answer it, or came up with two more unanswerable questions; one each. He said it would grow our minds, trying to fathom infinity like that... The first time he asked us about the stars, me and Heath were out there for hours."

"What was the question?"

"I think it was the same one: how many, or how can it be measured. Something like that."

"What did you come back with?"

"We made up a story. We decided the answer was that, every single blade of grass on this earth was pointing to a correlating star, even ones that are too far away to see."

I let myself imagine this for awhile. "That's a nice thought."

"Soon we were looking at forests and imagining that the branches were mapping galaxies...mountain peaks mapping universes..."

"That's a lot of universes..."

"But it's not infinity."

"It's still a lot."

"I guess so... I remember feeling really small after that. For the first time in my life."

"Small in a good way?"

"In a powerful way."

"How do you feel small in a powerful way?"

"By standing at the foot of this thing that feels like infinity, and knowing you can choose whatever you want."