Waves And Particles

Waves and Particles

The fire comes at you like a wave.

You only have nanoseconds, but your brain goes into overdrive. A million thoughts explode across your synapses, scattered like particles across your mind.

Of course, the first of these is “why didn’t I cut the blue wire?”

Cutting the red wire may not have been the problem; bombs are complicated things and full of tricks. But the puzzle is annoying because you know there won’t be any time to solve it. Never finding the answer becomes momentarily more annoying than being blown to pieces.

Of course, you do find your thoughts drifting back to your imminent demise, but thankfully, other thoughts take precedence. My personal theory, admittedly formed is a certain amount of haste, is that your brain does its best to send you happy thoughts before you die.

Love is the most powerful of these, a feeling rather than a memory.

I think of Carol, but she appears to me as flashes. Her smile comes first, in so many different ways: that birthday where she dropped the cake, our first date, that time we kissed in Brighton at midnight, when we walked in the forest where I proposed. These images are facets of a vast gem. A million sides and moments that make up the whole of who she is and who I knew her to be.

This brings another wave, a feeling that washes over you and wraps you in it completely. I don’t know if this new wave is my love for her, or her love for me, but it washes over me with an undeniable strength. It is filled with particles of sadness, because I will be gone. Love, like light, is both wave and particle it seems. But there is a strange comfort in the sadness. I will be missed. I have placed a mark on the world, and touched at least one other life. It all meant something. Even if it leaves sadness behind, it also leaves love and memory.

It begins a smile inside me, but one that will never reach my lips as there simply is no time.

The wave of fire hits me, and I become particles.