PJ Swift

Things fell apart

Things fell apart, already

so very long ago

somewhat

and yet, here we spin

around each other

held, by indisputable force

We shift like a giant zodiac across the sky

a pixelated impression

of our fingers stretched

to touch, connect, collide,

but drifting yet again

disappearing into the heavens

not to dissolve, dissipate or fade away

but to return

but to spin, and reach and stretch,

and fall apart, again

already

The first trillionaire

The world's first trillionaire could afford any whim that crossed his fancy.  Though he had a stable of partners and lovers, there was one who especially captured his fancy.  To display the vast depths of his affection, the trillionaire commissioned the creation of a constellation of satellites shaped like a massive heart. This enormous glowing heart, made of a thousand bright satellites twinkling across the heavens would be his forever legacy to his love (as well as an undisputed victory for his ego.).  But there were miscalculations in implementing the plan.   Yes, the satellites were successfully launched and placed in the position of a heart.  The problem was the angle from which they were viewed.   For a brief moment, in the middle of the night, when viewed from Earth, the constellation did look like a perfectly shaped heart.  But as the constellation appeared and later disappeared, viewed from a side angle, it looked like a giant middle finger -- which was exactly how the Earth's inhabitants felt about the world's first trillionaire.   

Dream archive

We arrive at the nearby star cluster to visit its illustrious archive, a construction so colossal that it dwarfs anything conceivable on Earth. We wander through a tiny fraction of its millions of stories, each floor a labyrinth of seemingly endless hallways of seemingly endless length. We are not here for any particular research; we are simply in awe of this comprehensive catalogue that stores every human dream ever dreamt. Each day and night, the archive expands a considerable extent.

I approach an administrator and ask if the archive has sufficient space for all these dreams and all future ones as well.  They assure me that this star cluster, far larger than our solar system, has an almost unimaginable storage capacity. But then they add something unexpected: despite its immense size, the archive is not vast enough to contain the unrealized dreams of even one person on Earth. One thing that all this cataloging has ascertained is that nothing in the universe has that capacity.