I want to understand the origins of the universe, but right now understanding the origins of hate is more pressing.

I want to write a poem about this, but I have so many windows open on my computer that I have a practical universe of knowledge crowding my screen or maybe crowning my screen, trying to break free.

If I don’t close these windows, my computer is going to crash. Typing has already slowed to a crawl, like time does when we’re in danger and every second counts.

I don’t have time to wrap my head around a birth inside a massive black hole that itself was situated inside a larger parent universe than the one we know, barely know, want to know, can never know.

How much more, I think, could go wrong inside an even larger universe? While physicists try to rewrite the laws of physics, I don’t even have time to write a poem because that’s not what I’m doing today. I’m closing windows. I’m reading things later or never. I’m skimming poems on various pages and either being born again inside them or throwing up my hands and yelling, I don’t like this poem at all before clicking the little x at the top of the page.

What is born from collapse can never not know collapse, can never not return to collapse, I want to say to the nearest physicist while wagging my finger. We had one here in Toquerville three years ago. A particle physicist. She lived in the house next to ours. She and her husband, an assistant attorney general here in Utah, made a killing off the house during the pandemic, bought low and sold high, then left all us Southern Utah townies drought dry.

I tried to tell her wild birds were going to die because she’d placed her feeder in the kill range, which is between 3 and 30 feet of her home’s windows. She asked my husband what he did for a living but not me, all while making sure we both asked her daughter what she liked to do so girls wouldn’t be left out of conversations about how people pass their time.

Later, I watched a Ted Talk the physicist gave in which she said she was discriminated against in science because she was a woman. She never did move her feeder. I trilled when she and her husband sold their place. She made fun of my husband for not understanding her joke about the Large Hadron Collider. It was a bad joke. She erased me in her conversation about girls, women, and erasure. Jon and I were like lower-dimensional objects being absorbed and dissolved by a higher-dimenstional one. That’s a thing, apparently, that physicists have observed. Or believe they’ve observed. Or theorized. Or hypothesized. Or something. Ask our no-longer neighbor.

I want the physicist to see this post. I want her to know how she othered Jon and me even as she spoke publicly about being othered. She and her faculty appointment. She and her dull humor. She and her dark matter.

Not all collapse ends with a singularity, I gather as I glance at the window that contains the story I’m trying not to read or understand. Sometimes, there’s a rebound and expansion occurs. In this model, the force is gravity. Purely gravity. No speculative forces or particles needed. No dark energy or dark matter. Imagine wasting your whole professional life on something that may not even be there at all. I think that’s what it’s like to be a poet, too. To create anything. Hell, just to exist.

If expansion is our future, so be it. Let this all begin again. I hope in that future, whatever me-like energy exists has the guts to be a stronger force than that of a physicist who weaponizes casual conversations so she can feel exponentially larger than those around her.

Oh, look. I feel something like hatred. Let me understand that, universe. Let me explore that energy until I can release it or until we are all released from this, whatever this is, this thing we barely know, want to know, can never know.

By the way, physicist. I’m a writer. I write about folks like you. That’s what I do.