The Most Beautiful Sunrise I Will Never See

Sometimes I lie awake in wonder that I, a self-referential, recursive consciousness, exist at all. Not that the matter comprising “me” exists, but that it has aligned just so, igniting the spark of life, perhaps the most terrifying and primordial fear we carry. Life, goddamn.

That shock of existence has led us to invent gods, religions, cosmologies. This thermodynamic miracle of self-awareness is the most stultifying fact we know.

Many get hung up on why there is something rather than nothing. I'm uninterested in that question (though I’d argue there’s plenty of nothing, if by that we mean not-life). I have no use for that kind of metaphysics. I'm a pragmatist to the core: I am here, in some capacity—whether created, evolved, or, as the latest empty fad insists, a fractal in a computer program, the artifact of some ludicrous AI system.

What interests me is twofold: our relentless effort to avoid this most uncomfortable fact of life, and our horror at the prospect of not-life. We keep ourselves “busy” not, I suspect, because we have so much to do, but because that busyness masks the uncanniness of being alive at all. Routine shields us. Habit protects us from confronting the absurdity of existence.

I have a theory (completely unfalsifiable and, at best, a kind of poetic heuristic) that matter’s natural state is non-life. We are anomalous, and some part of us knows it, knows this brief flicker of consciousness is, somehow, unnatural. We come screaming into the world. Fitting. And the matter in us longs to return, even as our awareness cannot fathom what that return entails.

We understand death—the extinguishing of the spark. But we fundamentally cannot comprehend nothingness, though it is the universe’s default condition.

We crave that return even as we remain trapped in a strange loop of self-awareness, terrified to exist and yet more terrified to end.

Part of me recognizes that my matter existed without me for near-eternity. I had no spark of life when Montaigne breathed genius onto the page, was absent for the Japanese invasion of Korea and China last century, have only read of Crassus choking on molten gold. These things happened. I know them only through record. Perhaps this is how we gesture toward nothingness: by admitting that the past unfolded without us, and we without it.

But I find it unfathomable that now—now that I have a mind in motion—it will someday go dark. That life will go on without me. And yet, everything in me is racing toward that end. Entropy always wins. Every heartbeat is a countdown. The sunrise the day after I die will be the most beautiful I will never see.