“What a way to go,” I thought to myself as I watched the shards of glass from what was once the window of my ship slowly drift toward their shadowy destination. As a quantum researcher, I knew people were sucked into black holes occasionally, but it always happened to somebody you knew or a friend of a friend, not you. I cursed my flight planners for miscalculating my journey so poorly and tried to think about death some more. I wasn't ready to die.
This was my first time even seeing a black hole and I ended up going into it. What awful luck. I figured since my fate was pretty much sealed, I might as well try to be an optimist about the whole thing. “At least I’m facing the stars,” I thought to myself.
I’d always loved how Space looked. I thought it was so beautifully minimalistic and perfect. I thought about the constellations I once drew with my finger. I tried to draw some constellations with the stars I was given, but I was stumped. There was really only one thing I could think of: snow.
I’d never seen snow in my whole life. Being a kid from Mars, it was never really in the forecast. I’d always meant to get to a planet that had snow but I was so busy with all the other curiosities in the world, like black holes. This made me think of that old expression: curiosity killed the cat. I tried to ignore it, but in the end, it hit me right on the nose. I felt the gravitational pull around me increase exponentially as the black hole pulled me deeper inside.
As my speed increased, I gradually gained a bit of excitement—soon I was going to learn what the galaxy’s best quantum researchers could only dream of. That really made me feel like a nerd, but nobody could call me a nerd around here. I realized that, from here on out, I was the only living thing that had any effect on me. That meant no more friends and no more enemies. I was glad I was out of enemies, but I thought I might need friends, so I decided to create some. I would design my very own companion, like a snowman. There I was again, with the snow. At that moment, as if on command, the old dusty snow globe I kept on my desk in the ship floated toward me, a silver lining in my demise. I looked at the snow globe. It contained a cozy little cabin, a peppermint-colored sign titled: the North Pole, and, of course, a smiling snowman. The snow globe must have cracked in the crash because little white flakes swam out of the glass dome and danced with the stars. I watched them flutter around until I saw one of the stars flicker out of existence. A couple of seconds later, another star did the same. This meant that time was warping around me, passing faster. I was nearing the center of the void.
My life flashed before my eyes as I awaited my doom. I remember working so hard to become a researcher, only to be cursed by the thing I loved so much. I wanted the black hole to take me, crush my atoms in its infinitely dense core. However, what happened was much worse.
I watched the stars extinguish much faster now, rapid-fire, one after the other, until there was only one left. I clung to it with my heart, but that did not stop it from vanishing into the blackness of space. So then it was just me, some trillion-year-old creature that had only had its life left to lose. I closed my eyes and screamed, for nobody but me to hear, as I plummeted deeper and deeper into the void.
To my surprise, the bright white specks slowly emerged from the darkness, but this time they weren’t stars. I felt my fall finally come to an end and I laid down, cold and wet. I stood up to see a cozy cabin, a sign, and an old friend. After all this time I’d lived and all the distance I’d traveled, I had finally found snow.