Dear Echo

I know the planet Earth is ’bout to explode. Kind of hope that no one saves it. We only grow from anguish. — Mac Miller In the likely event of galactic calamity — our sun’s hydrogen reserves fused through, the star-turned-red-giant bloating as do our corpses — you will require flames. Between the solar shockwave and Earth’s rattling — an opaque interval — you must stare, but we people prior will have left no crude fluid for ignition, for light, having tapped this rock to gorge our bellies to petroleum ache. Perhaps you will have evolved — blood supplemented with Edison and Tesla’s currents, half your body fed by generators that slow-cure your biomass or waste. Maybe you will be self-luminous. But if you are still — like we, like me — a mere meat-pod fated to watch Mercury and Venus engulfed, surely you hold designs for an interplanetary ark. Anticipate humanity’s years spent adrift in the dark liquor of space — lost within hibernation and missing mother- planet, further estranged from all revelation of how we came to be. From this unproven vantage point (inside our history with no solid alpha), I claim to pity your inherited task — to catalog the last telluric pulse, close the case of man as now known. But beneath my softened hide, I’m envious. All of our missteps as shepherds, all the graffiti eclipsing our souls, all of it will cinder and you will view this erasure from your Mars-bound barge. You will know the phenomenon that is judgment, see it real-time as prophets allegedly witnessed. Man will never have beheld a clearer beacon to be reborn —