The Woman, and her Hamster

Let’s go on a journey, squeaked the hamster from his tiny pocket in the woman’s bag.

“But where to?” Asked the woman to her tiny rodent friend.

“Up.” He answered.

And so, she did, she opened up her umbrella and started floating upwards. She saw the ground fall further and further away from her feet, and the awestruck people below pointing upwards ‘Is it a bird? Is it a plane?’ – No, and it wasn’t Mary Poppins either.

The people slowly became specks below, worth nothing. In fact, as she got further up, through the clouds, she couldn’t see any people at all. Only giant masses of land, industry and black oil filling up the space where the ocean had once been. The hamster giggled at her. “We are silly aren’t we?”

“Yes, but we’re also amazing.”

“How so?”

“Well-“

And they rose further and further up, through the Troposphere, the Stratosphere, the Mesosphere and all the other spheres that made this impossible, incredible, astronomically miraculous thing called life, possible. The woman and the hamster could see tiny specks of light in the distance, likely swallowed by the black void by now, the remnant of their life only just reaching the woman and the hamster on a relatively low speed highway called light. Much closer they could see their distance ancestor’s relative – the sun. The woman waved with her arm made of stardust, and the Hamsters little paw just reached out the top of the bag.

The umbrella kept lifting the two higher and higher, faster and faster, until they passed Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus.

“You were saying how humans are amazing? I can’t even see Earth anymore; the solar system has already forgotten about you and we haven’t even reached the galaxy yet.”

They carried on travelling, zoomed past alpha centauri burst through a nebula that filled their souls with vibrancy.

“Yes, but think about this;

In the trillion of lightyears that form space, in all of observable universe that we can see, in all of the tiny amount of time that has existed – this crazy thing called life happened.

Atoms, by chance, had mass. Mass created stars that exploded in an inconceivable bound of energy that scattered life giving materials across barren rocks. Barren rocks transformed from hellholes into tranquil oceans of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. And on one of those rocks, by a mishmash of a thousand million chances we got the one that made life. And further still, past instinct, life became sentient. Despite the absolutely negligible chance, and the uncaring of the universe, an atom figured out that it existed. It got the chance to be aware that YES, the universe is beautiful! The universe itself woke up and said wow, look at me!”

“I guess you’re right I-“

“And then the universe thought! HAH! You’re not in control of me! I am you! And so it started building, it started building and making and sharing and discovering and it began to wonder how far can I go? How much of myself can I see before my spark of light fizzles out and the universe explodes and begins again? How many more cycles of big bangs and freeze-deaths will happen before I get another chance to try again and discover myself!? For all know this might be my only chance for trillions and trillions of years! So we build rockets – we build spaceships – we’ll create more life that can outlast us and then it will travel the stars for us with the same materials that were used to build us – the universe will continue to explore itself for as long as it knows that it exists!”

The woman and the hamster burst out of the milky way, smashed through comets and crashed through solar winds on their way, and finally, they stopped accelerating, slowed down, and looked around at the universe.

“It’s… Quiet, up here.” Said the Hamster.

“Yeah. A little lonely too.” She replied.

“What say we go back down, and tell everyone what we saw?”

“No. What say we let them discover for themselves.”

“That sounds good.” Spoke the hamster.

Like Mary Poppins, she floated back through the milky way, past the stars and the moons, waved at the sun, and tapped her heels on dry land.

“Say,” Said the hamster. “Shall we go on an adventure?”

“Sure.” Said the woman, and walked back home.

————————————————————————————————————————

Inspired by Exurb1a: