The Predetermined End of Asteroid-2013 MA85

This rock does not know what it’s doing. Its motivation is not sinister, does not think of victims. It abides the laws of gravity and apples and De Mundi Systemate. It does not know it was once—and will be again—the victim. This rock. This hunk of iron and sodium and carbon and nickel and copper and gold and nitrogen and magnesium and calcium was at one time, beyond memory, a much larger rock in an orbit with a balloon of hydrogen fire. For eons it obeyed, swam in the vacuum, harbored lonesome moons, tilted and wobbled with seasons until another rock’s path met its own. From that rock, this rock was broken and separated and hurtled out of sashay and became something else, something scorched and burned and cracked, something molten and wild, something cooled and hard and aimless, waiting for something to grab hold of it again, to be kept by gravitational pull, that never-ignored force, that blind, unshakable squeeze. T his rock is destined to meet its end. This rock will meet our rock. This rock will happily, finally, destroy itself simultaneously breaking, scorching, and hurtling our rock out of orbit. We, once aware this rock is coming, will kneel. Mercy will be our word but there will be no knowledge of how to obtain it. There will be no thought that this rock and our rock are cousins, made of the same metal, birthed in that same microsecond of a microsecond of a microsecond, that moment of disconsolation and ozone, that moment of dejection and confinement, that moment of everything you and everything I and everything we. We will pray for an understanding, but all we will understand is that understanding isn’t the problem. The problem is the problem and terminology is not the solution unless that term is topological defect. The solution, for us, is acceptance. And there will be acceptance, just as there was when this rock mindlessly went from homeostasis to that microsecond of a microsecond of a microsecond when sublimation took over, when dry ice became apparition. The acceptance was the exhale, that last feeling of breath given back. It was slow. It was the breeze playing the hollow notes of the wind chime, the persistent F-sharp and A-minor until the green flash of ozone-lit magnesium turned white in oxygen. The blue of the iron, C-sharp. The vacuum before the sonic waves. The osmosis of dew on grass. This is what we will need to learn—that breath before the boom, that moment when dipoles fail.

We will abandon the instinct to rampage, to fall back on the heels of our humanity, to yield ourselves to trees, to develop gills and slink into water, to dissolve into single-cells and sift to the forgotten depth of ocean where light also means predator. We will be bacteria. We will not think of what’s fair and what will never be. But I fear we will again forget our flight and attach ourselves until we are out of water, breathing oxygen, and harvesting orchards until our first retreat filters through our minds and retells futility. We know we will never satisfy ourselves, and we will welcome the rock, understanding, finally, that this rock’s path was set in place long before we were we. We will understand that this is a rock. We will understand that this is the rock that will be the liberation, the squeal of the nail ripped from the wood, the exhale of what was never ours to keep.