How to Earth same world · other eyes
← All scenes
the same situation, seen by

the first night in an empty apartment

Field notes on the real
Look closely enough and everything is a miracle with units.

You are lying on the floor because the bed has not arrived, and I want you to consider what that floor is doing to hold you up. Not the wood, the electrons. The atoms in the boards and the atoms in your back never actually touch; they can't. Their outer electrons repel each other so ferociously that you float a fraction of a nanometer above a surface you are certain you are pressed against.

You have never once touched anything in your life. You are hovering, always have been, over every chair and every hand you ever held.

The apartment feels empty, but the room is heaving with air: roughly a thousand trillion trillion molecules of nitrogen and oxygen, sprinting past your face at the speed of a rifle bullet, colliding with your skin a few billion times each second. That faint pressure in your ears is the atmosphere leaning on you with the weight of a small car, evenly, from all directions, so gently distributed you register it as nothing.

The quiet is not empty either. Sound is just those same molecules jostling in waves, and with no furniture to absorb them the walls throw every small noise back at you, bare and undamped. That is why your own breathing sounds enormous. You are hearing the physics of a box with nothing in it yet.

The light from the streetlamp arrives on your ceiling having crossed the window in about a nanosecond, but the warmth in your own chest, the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, those were forged inside collapsing stars and flung across the galaxy over billions of years to end up here, on this floor, tonight, waiting for a bed.

An empty room is the emptiest thing there is, and it is still absolutely crowded with the universe.