The alarm clock screeches, as it does every morning, though this morning it seemed harsher than most. Today is the day, the 8th. I hurriedly scour the floor of my bedroom for something to wear. Finding a plain white t-shirt balled up in the corner and a pair of jeans thrown over my desk chair. I pull them on. My room has been in a continual state of disarray for about a year now, ever since it happened. I ran my fingers through my hair only adding to my severe case of bedhead. Satisfied, I walked to my desk pushing aside my personal stockpile of books, their titles varying from The Brief History of Time to The Fabric of the Cosmos. Opening one of the abandoned notebooks with my name, Noah, scrolled across it in permanent marker, I ripped out a sheet of paper haphazardly, not bothering with the jagged edges. Selecting a random pen from amidst the papers, which devoured my desk, I began to write.

Dear Emma,

String theory claims that there is a multiverse of universes where multiple realities play them selves out, and when two universes collide they can form another universe but when a universe splits in half it creates two universes and that is, in all its simplicity the Big Bang. Physics is kind of like love I guess, because when people collide at the right moment something happens, a big bang. Theories are only theories though, and I’m only sixteen, so I am hardly qualified to make any conjectures about love or life or anything for that matter. Though, if I were asked what the meaning of life is I would say physics because it is logical in a perfectly illogical way.
You’ll probably never end up reading this but that’s okay because I think I might be doing this for me, for therapeutic reasons. I should probably get on with this before I forget what I wanted to say; you know how I stutter and forget what I want to say, and end up looking like an idiot. Today is August 8th; it would have been our one year and eight month anniversary. Remember how I used to laugh at you and say monthly anniversaries were for 12 year olds. You would always roll your eyes at me because you liked the thought of having hypothetical anniversaries.
It’s been almost a year since you left, well, one year in six days, and I’ve just come to terms with the fact that you are never coming back…ever. I think the phase I’ve been going through for the past year, where I just lie on my bedroom floor for hours waiting for you to show up on my door step, is almost over. It’s been a hard year but it’s almost over… finally. I’ve been reading, a lot, nonfiction mostly. Do you remember how I used to go on and on about physics and you would call me a nerd. Well, I’ve been reading about multiverses. Did you know, there are 11 dimensions a single universe but within the eleven dimensions are separate realities? All of these dimensional universes just float around in a larger arena of sorts, a hyperspace, and there are all of these multiple parallel universes right beside ours. There is a theory that there are gateways that we can pass through into other realities, like Alice entered the looking glass into Wonderland. It kind of got me thinking, somewhere there might be a world where on that 3rd of September we had never had that argument and you didn’t walk away. Or a world in which I chased after you. We would still be together.
Sometimes when I walk by your house, well your old house now, I wonder where you are, how far away you are. Do you even remember me? I wish you could still talk to me or at least give me a sign, come back to haunt me. I’ve gone the entire page without writing the L-word but honestly I’d say I still love you and I don’t think I will ever stop. I hope they're treating you well up there because I miss you more than ever

Noah,

Folding the note up, I slip it into my pocket. I grab my car keys from the corner of the desk; I was ready. No one was up early enough to question me, and as I shut the front door with caution, not wanting to wake my parents, I began to think. Think about that day, the 3rd of September.

The silver Toyota, smeared with streaks of mud, was parked crookedly in the driveway, an example of my little sisters inability to drive. She had just begun learning and was clearly not a natural in regards to any aspect of driving. Pulling myself into the car I jam the keys into the engine, twisting them so that the car would start. I rub my eyes feeling the weight of insomnia on my eyelids. Flashes of images from that day still play themselves out in my mind, like a black and white movie continually rewinding, haunting me, torturing me. It was all my fault.


Emma was yelling something at me, her face red. Tears, tinted with mascara, run down her cheeks. I shout back at her, saying things I can’t remember, things I didn’t mean. What I had said that day was an unimportant detail compared to what would happen in the end.


My vision is clouded, and as I back out of the driveway my hands shake as they grip the steering wheel.

Emma slammed the front door. I was only a step behind her, still shouting, but this time just one word, “Go”. She began to run, her converse slapping the pavement, hands covering her face as she sobbed. I watched.

Bright yellow lights glared at me, jolting me from my dream state. I had drifted off into the other lane beside me, only realizing it in time to swerve out of the path of an oncoming van. The moment of reality was over, my mind sinking back into a dazed fog.

Emma didn’t even look up to see it. The truck barreling down the street at her. It happened so fast, but my mind caught the image like an old Polaroid camera going off at just the right second. She was there one second, and the next she wasn’t. She ceased to exist in this universe.

I stop the car in front of the cemetery gates. Putting it in park I climb out. Her head stone wasn’t hard to find, I’d been to it what feels like a million times. It sat among hundreds of others in linear rows. The only thing distinguishing it form the others is the stack of letters in a pile at the foot of the marker, fastened together with a ribbon, and held down by a stone the size of a fist. I stood there for a minute my eyes gazing up at the sky, looking for a sign, a ray of light, anything. Then I sank down to my knees tucking the letter beneath the stone along with the others, one for each month. I began to speak. What I said meant nothing and everything all at once.


“There is a theory some physicist somewhere came up with. It’s built off the realization that our universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. One day the universe will just end, it will end in a “Big Freeze”. In theory the night sky will no longer be a host to millions of gleaming stars. Instead it will be black. Stars will have exhausted their nuclear fuel, and the universe will consist of dead black wholes devoid of light, the temperature will reach near absolute zero, and at that point consciousness will cease to exist. Is that what it’s like when you die… a big freeze?”

I stand, brushing the dirt from my jeans, and shove my hands into the depths of my pockets. It was time to go, I had done what I had come to do, but I would be back again on the 8th of the month, tucking another envelope into the pile. And she would still be here too…