Eternal Sundays

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As I finish washing up in the bathroom, I call to her: “That sky was amazing, last night, wasn’t it?”

“I was actually just thinking about the same thing,” she replies from the bedroom. “It’s not just the sheer beauty and the mind-whirling vastness of the distances… The sizes… The unimaginable power… You look up and you see hundreds, thousands, and millions of years into the past…”

I dry my hands and walk the few steps leading to the bedroom’s doorway, into whose frame I lean a shoulder. She’s laying in bed, facing me, staring into the ideas assembling in her mind. She could put yesterday’s light show to shame.”Yeah, you look at the North Star, that’s more than four hundred years, right there,” I chime in. “We could see Andromeda last night, too. That’s something like two-and-a-half million years into the past. Marty McFly can eat his heart out!”

She laughs. “But it’s not just the stars and galaxies. We see the sun as it was about eight minutes ago. The moon, a little over a second… It doesn’t stop to the sky, though. When we were looking at the view from the top of the mountain, yesterday, we were seeing the horizon as it was a longer time ago than the village at the foot of the mountain.”

“Tiny differences,” I nod, “but, yeah…”

She looks up. “Ridiculously small! But they’re there. As you stand in the doorframe, you’re farther in my past than my hand is.” Which she raises up and stares at in wonderment. Extending her arm, she continues. “My fingertips are farther in my past than my palm, which is farther than my elbow, and so on… I think most people go around their days believing they’re surrounded by -Nows-, but the fact is that, as we look around us, we’re seeing a sea of -Pasts-; all extending farther in time and in proportion with distance. And each of us’ Nows are actually the Futures of others. It’s sad in a sense, as it means you and I never actually truly share a common Now. To do that, we’d need to close up any separating distance enough to sort of fuse… God knows we do try that!”

I join in her laughter.

“In real life, we can ignore that easily enough: the scales are minuscule and I am as far away in your Past as you are in mine, after all,” she goes on. “But then, if you throw relativistic speeds in there, all hell breaks loose, doesn’t it? Defining a common and universal Now gets impossible. Which brings me to something I once read about Einstein’s ultimate view on time. Late in his life, dear old Albert concluded that -all- time had to exist simultaneously. All points of the past, present and future are equally as -real-. Time is not this floor whose tiles just appear out of nowhere when you step forward, and disappear behind you as you step off of them. The tiles are all there, always have been, and always will be!”

“Mind blown,” I acquiesce as I join her in bed and lay my head in the small of her back. Ideas and questions are tumbling in my thoughts. I thrillingly know we’ll be discussing this a good part of the morning, with lazy bodies but hectic minds. The whole thing sounds so deterministic for one, and there is the matter of the famed arrow of time… This is going to be a ride!

“Damn, I love our Sundays!” I exhale before we go on.

“And they just might be eternal,” she smiles back at me.