He Who Exists

by Clayton Barnes

He couldn’t remember his name, the touch of the wind on his skin, or a single person he had ever known. What he could remember was the void. Deafening silence swallowed even the idea of a sound. If he still had eyes, he would see the most stunningly beautiful things. Stars throwing graceful arcs of plasma millions of miles long. Planets pirouetting around invisible ellipses. Galaxies harboring life and beauties beyond conception. All the wonders of the infinite cosmos, and he couldn’t see any of it. He couldn’t speak, move, or do anything else that a living being has the right to do. For all intents and purposes, he wasn’t living. The man floating through the endless abyss began his journey in what would become Leningrad sometime in the 8th century. He had lived a basic existence struggling to survive the harsh tundra until he realized that he didn’t have to struggle. He didn’t have to do anything. He didn’t need to eat, drink, sleep, or breathe. What he did have to do

was watch, experience, and exist. He enjoyed this immensely for the first few hundred years. Half a millennium later, he was bored. A millennium after that, despondent. Five million millennia after his birth, he was overcome with joy as the only other constant he knew slowly grew more expansive and redder as it crested the horizon each morning. He had watched and learned for more than long enough to know what was coming. The sun would grow until it swallowed the Earth, vaporizing him and the ground beneath his feet into fusion material. Or so he thought. Sure enough, his respite approached. The land burned, the seas boiled, the Earth itself melted and roiled. His body was damaged beyond what could be called life, but his immortal mind went on after Earth was atomized. After the death throes of the life-giving sun. After every gravitational body in the solar system was absorbed or blasted away. He endured, he drifted, and he existed.