Dear Void,
In order to better understand where you're coming from and what you're trying to articulate, I've realized that I must do precisely the opposite. It's not in the attempt to contemplate the inconceivably vast universe and all that it encompasses, but rather in contemplating the conceivably small and familiar and near, that I come closer to a better understanding of just what you are, dear Void.
So let's begin.
I'll start with a nut, and not just any nut but a sunflower seed—since all nuts are seeds just of the human-consumption type. This seed, with its tough, dark grey outer coating protecting its mealy, tasty kernel inside, from which a sunflower stalk mayhaps sprout given the right conditions, or which may find itself masticulated in the mouths of a squirrel, titmouse or Billy Bob on his daily trucking route between Oklahoma City and Houston, or which may just fall out of a bag or some emaciated flower-head in some lonely patch of yard and land on the desolate earth and find no moisture there and dry into dust; its promise—which all seeds are kind of a promise, aren't they?—wasted.
All of the different avenues, all of the different lives and stories, a single plain seed can take. There's something about randomness and probability and hope and despondency in this.
There was a randomness at the beginning, when the first star lit up. Astronomers are just starting to see those first stars and first galaxies, using the most powerful telescopes like time machines, peering back billions and billions of light-years, sometimes using gravitational lenses to peer back even further at galaxies with their stars just beginning to switch on.
That time must have been so fresh and invigorating and full of promise for you, dear Void. Like the first drop of dew on an endless desert dune staring out at a grey, vague sea, nothing but the waves to lull you to sleep—but then!—a speck of dew beads into being on your lapel.
A star is a promise, a mite of wishful thinking, a needle-point of hope in all your wide darknesses, Void. Do you cherish the stars in the same way we do? Do you spend your innumerable eons star-gazing? Or perhaps you're not as enamored by bright, shiny things as we, the minutely-intelligent animals we are.
But that's the ticker, ain't it?
That even small kindnesses, little kisses on baby's brows as they sleep, a hand held in the final, short seconds of life, a tiny flame to light your way through dark caverns—they truly matter all the more, then, don't they? They do matter more, I think, because you are so wide and so cold and so unknown, Void. Like your stars which are actually less than 1% of your total mass (or something like that) still, it is because they are small, infinitesimal even, that makes them matter all the more.
All of the many acts, most small, comprising our tiny little lives on this blue ball in the cosmos may seem meaningless against the girth of the universe, but it is because they are small, seemingly meaningless when gazed down upon from such largess, that they are all the more precious and special and filled with bottomless depths of meaning.
So, eat your sunflower seeds.
Signing off, on this three days before Halloween, 2019.