I had always thought death would be black, but I saw violet.
I could not say where I was as it did not have a name. To describe it as succinctly as possible, I was in a void at the edge of the universe, but not the end. Someone back on Earth had told me the universe was infinite. I had always found that idea foolish, but now, I can see the truth in it. My error was believing infinite meant it had no end, when in reality, infinite meant there is always something beyond.
It was by error I ended up here, some cruel dice rolled by an uncaring and omnipotent hand. It was a routine teleportation, but it wasn’t until we were being pulled into the manufactured hole in spacetime that the warp drive started screaming and flashing red. I do not know where the others are, but if I had to speculate, they were now floating at the other edges of the universe.
I had undone the latch on my helmet long ago, allowing it to slowly float off my head. It was a death sentence, of course, but I did it anyway.
Yet, I did not die. I simply remained, breathing in stardust and suffocating on gravity.
As I took another deep breath of primordial excess, I saw some cool stream of nebulous gas materialize from the space, coiling around my partially exposed body with deep shades of blue and violet, moving as if pulled by an invisible string. Without even thinking, I found myself willfully coaxed into moving with it, following the steps of some galactic dance.
The rest of my body came free of the spacesuit as I gave myself over to the universe’s spontaneous rhythms, and soon, I was nothing but a body surrounded by stars that had yet to form. I did not know how I was moving, I did not know how I was breathing, nor did I care to know.
As the universe’s song came to a close, and I fell into starburst, I saw a brilliant light coming towards me. It enveloped me in an instant, washing over me like a desultory current from a river flowing for the first time. I had thought it would be white, but it was blue like a friend’s final embrace and violet like the sweet smell of spring rain.
This was all a fluke, the way the universe pulled itself together and gave itself over to invisible forces. Stars formed and died like the seasons, but its beauty is endless. The way I too was dying and the way the universe continued on the same regardless, as for every end in this world, there was something beyond it.
It was the silent scream of a star forming that caused that light, rush through space in torrents that people like me drowned in. It happened so fast it was not feasible, but it happened anyway. I am its only witness, even if for only a brief glimmer of time. As I lie here dying, I am infinite.
Josh Hicks is a member of the class of 2025 at University Park and is majoring in astronomy and astrophysics. In his free time he enjoys staring into space, staring up at space, writing, writing about space, and wasting absurd amounts of time on farming video games.