Collider

I didn’t click on the link. I think that that you would have. You were always on the quest for a greater knowledge. You were always striving to be better. I looked up to you in that way. I think you would have done what I didn’t do. I think you would have clicked the link just out of curiosity.

The title of the link was “Large Hadron Collider Proves Existence of Other Dimensions.” It made me think of you. I thought of alternate dimensions. I thought of alternate realities that overlapped with ours. I thought of a space and time where you still existed. Like you were just in the other room. I thought of this and it brought me peace for a moment.

The headline called to mind my cumulative ‘knowledge’ of alternate realities, the things that comic books and movies have taught me. I knew that any you that existed in an alternate reality would most likely be an embellished version of you. Like the alternate reality version of you would look like you and sound like you, but maybe this you would only have your serious personality attributes, the side of you that studied all day and didn’t have time for making silly YouTube videos or for yelling at drunk people from our third story window during finals week. OR the alternate reality you could only have your more spontaneous traits. The parts of you that made us laugh or kept us guessing what you were going to next. I thought of these possibilities and I was okay with either.

Being aware of these alternate realities, made me think of countless versions of you that were living on in parallel overlapping realities to ours and it brought me contentment to think of you this way. You were gone, yes, but you were just in the next room.

Then, lying awake, I began to plot in my head ways in which we could rip the layers of reality and steal whichever version of you we could find from another plane of existence. I wasn’t sure how this would work, since I didn’t click on the link, but I thought a good place to start would be accessing the Large Hadron Collider. I thought that it was probably in Sweden and it would be well worth the price of a plane ticket to at least try to gain access to it.

I realized that this was a selfish thought and even if we were able to access a parallel reality in which to steal you back to ours it would probably just cause a domino effect of people going over to another reality to steal a Bryan back to theirs. You’re an invaluable commodity in that way. I knew it was egotistic to plot these things so I explored other methods in which we could get you back.

I remembered a drunken Matthew Mcconaughey saying that “time is a flat circle.” I thought of this and it seemed like an easier route. I thought that maybe we could somehow bypass the laws of the space-time continuum and cut across the diameter of time back to the days when we were all safe, together, young, and free. A time in which I could simply open my bedroom door and there you would be, sitting on the floor in front of our 13in television, watching cable news and eating a pan-muffin. I thought about stepping out of my bedroom door and telling you how important you are to me, how I wouldn’t be the man I am without you in my life, how you’ve always inspired me to be a better version of myself. There was a thought that being able to tell you these things would somehow set things right and prevent whatever bad things that were coming years in the future from happening.

I knew that this whole line of thinking was ridiculous, but at the same time I felt that it was possible.

You see I had felt the shift of the time and space continuum once already. I felt the shredding of reality as I knew it. It was there in the sound of my phone vibrating on my desk. It was there in the sound of Matt’s voice when I finally got to answer his call. The reception was fuzzy, the call broke up, and I couldn’t understand what he said. I asked him to say it again. He said the two words again. Those two words went against everything I believed to be true so I asked him to repeat it again. Matt said the two words again and this time it was his voice that broke up.  I comprehended what he said enough to be mad at myself for making him say it three times, but I still didn’t understand. I’m not sure I ever will in the same way in which I don’t understand the physics of the time-space continuum or how the mechanics of the large hadron collider proves the existence of other dimensions. I don’t think I’ll ever understand these things. But I think you would have. You always knew the answers or you would try your best to find them. You would have clicked the link. 

The last time we were together—Minooka, IL—November, 2014