Forever

Gone is a long time, it kinda sounds like forever. And forever is a strange word, it's hard to imagine.
Sometimes I think I can picture forever. I picture it like this.

Take a laser beam, and shoot it right up through the stars. It would be a special laser beam, of course, one that was stronger than a volcano, and one that stayed strong, no matter how far away you shine it. It would start up like a roar on earth and shoot up past the moon in an instant. It would sail past all the planets like lightning, it would brush galaxies, and streak through astroid belts. And no matter how far and how fast you followed it in a space shuttle, you would never be able to catch up with the end of that red line of light. It would be billions of lightyears away from earth, but it would just keep going and going and going.

Then I picture zooming out on the whole incident. Zooming out and out until the milky way is just a speck in a sea of specks. Then, I watch that little red line growing and growing. Expanding and flying through space like water, trickling across dirt.

I try to picture how big I am in comparison.
Which, when you're talking in terms concerning outer space and viewing thousands of galaxies at one time, is less than microscopic. In fact, if I were doing a scientific experiment in which the results of the experiment were the size of the universe, and the margin of error were the size of human being in the universe, the error would be tossed out as insignificant.

After taking some time to meditate on my relative size, I whiz back down to earth, stand right at the base of that gigantic volcano laser beam....and I look up.

I picture that red light going up and up and up, but never reaching the ceiling. That's kinda how I picture forever. And gone is just as big.