It occurred to him suddenly—right as he was lighting the stove to boil water. He tried to ignore the thought, but it quickly bore a hole into his consciousness; the perception that his life was essentially a random and continuous collision of objects and ideas —of things. It could have seemed like such a simple formulation, an easy metaphor, but in that moment it became completely opaque and real to him.
He visualized it clearly: all of the points of his life in an orbit around his skull, their paths leaving criss-crossing dotted lines across his field of vision. At any given point in time he could only be tracking a handful of these objects, so he was therefore completely oblivious to the countless things that were hurtling toward each other beyond his focus. A lost memory from his childhood arcing dangerously close to a math equation he hadn’t used since college. A neglected friendship bumped into by an unpaid cable bill and sent hurtling into oblivion. A long ignored phobia collides directly into a sexual fantasy, the two objects smashing each other into a nebulous cloud of debris.
With this sudden awareness he strained to track as many of these things as he could; leaving scratched notes of coordinates, trajectories, potential collision points. Within a matter of weeks he had filled notebooks, stuffed his pockets with scribbled napkins and ATM receipts. He tried to make predictions, adjustments, losing sleep as he sat in bed tracking the orbiting pieces of his life. More and more it became clear that everything was moving at an unsettling velocity, and within a very limited space. It was obvious that the longer he continued, the more it would all be pounded into a chaotic mess.
The futility of his efforts quickly took their toll. His hands could no longer write, arthritic from desperately grasping at pens and pencil stubs. Even worse, his view of the future was clouded: he no longer had faith that things might improve with time and experience. He could only see the future as something that would progressively get worse in time; a downward-sloping graph. Paralysis quickly set in. He locked the door, lay in bed, closed his eyes, and helplessly watched a meteor shower on the backs of his eyelids as his life slipped further into entropy.
Awaking to darkness, he heard the sound of animals fighting outside his bedroom window. The shrill violence of the noises made it impossible to ignore —was that a raccoon? Or maybe a dog? His curiosity forced him out the bedroom door, down the hallway, onto the back porch. Looking around he saw no raccoons, no dogs, no blood. The sounds had stopped, and he had no idea which direction they had been coming from.
He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, released, and then looked up. What he saw angered him; against the night sky, in the center of his gaze, there was a brief streak of light. It was gone in an instant, but he had no doubt that he had seen a shooting star. How stupid. How stupid and cliched and completely meaningless. He felt as if some invisible person had flicked him in the earlobe, poked him in the eye, rubbed their knuckles into his scalp. A bad joke. A stupid fucking shooting star.
Even as his brain sputtered in objection he could already feel a sense of release. The logic of his precious metaphor dissolved—he could see his satellites fading into nothingness, the dotted lines behind disappearing with them. He resisted, tried to hold on, to remember why it made perfect sense, but this damned intruder had already changed something. A lifeless chunk of rock and ice had hurtled through the galaxy, past stars, planets, moons, past the geosynchronous orbits and international space stations, through the earth’s atmosphere, only to give him this slap in the face. Hope. That was all it was: hope. He knew there was no logic to it; no perfect metaphor, no trajectory or collision points. Just raw, unsolicited hope. It was exactly what he needed.
He scanned the backyard once more for evidence of fighting animals. Seeing only shadows, he went back inside, forgetting to lock the door behind him as he entered.