A better world is possible — for now, here’s collapse
I am the literal by-product of stars exploding and life itself persisting amidst ruin. Love endured, endures, through these, too.
My favorite Valentine’s Day story took place in outer space. Thirty-four years ago, scanning the sky obediently just past Neptune six billion kilometers from the sun, the spacecraft Voyager 1 turned back one last time and took its final sixty images of our solar system. Thirty minutes later, it turned off its cameras forever.
Among the photos Voyager 1 took was that of Earth seemingly suspended in a shaft of light, the image accidentally gifted by geometrical optics catapulting into fame as one of the most iconic photographs known to man. Had it been taken any other second, the angle of the sunbeam bouncing off the spacecraft wouldn’t have illuminated our planet as a faint pixel of light persisting amidst darkness.
I first learned about this story in 2016. I promptly decided I was in love with the image before I even saw it, the same way I decided I was in love with Pecier, the astronomer who told me about it one day, even before he finished his point. The sun had just set, and I was staring at the first few stars that appeared on the horizon. I asked him to tell me a random fact, the first one to pop into his mind.
Starlight is the past piercing the blanket of our present, he said. Looking up at the sky is essentially time travel.
I was suddenly very much aware of where I was: on a floating rock in space, in a country slightly north of an artificial line dividing said rock into two hemispheres, on a bus speeding through the Philippine North Luzon Expressway, being told of my place in the vastness of the universe by a man I had just met, my arm lightly grazing his, in total shock by the realization about how small and fleeting everything about existence including that very moment one golden afternoon in 2016 was.
I have never felt closer to another human being before in my life.
It was, however, possibly the worst time to fall in love, to dream wildly about our place in the universe, to consider what that meant for the responsibility of saving the planet, or to harbor even the slightest glimmer of hope that things will be okay and we can build a life together safe from dictators and disasters.
That year, our planet steadied towards destruction as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reached 403.3 parts per million, and global warming revealed itself more to be an actual threat that we simply couldn’t wax poetic about as a commentary on transience when our country alone annually gets devastated by at least twenty tropical cyclones.
2016 saw the rise of populist, misogynist, and climate change-denying leaders who practically saw themselves as gods ruling over men, as if blithely unaware of how a few years of being the most powerful person in their respective countries was less than the tiniest fraction of a millisecond in the whole lifespan of the universe.
2016 was also when my hazy years of aimlessness cemented into what I thought at that time was a death sentence after finally seeing a psychiatrist and getting diagnosed with bipolar disorder, the name of the illness finally lending sense and science to the self-destructive heaviness I lived with, which often cycled with fleeting episodes of pure euphoria. I always crashed back into the comfortable familiarity of rock bottom.
As is characteristic of that year, however, everything else won against all reason.
I found that Pecier was quite my opposite, and he was exactly the person you’d want to wait out the end of the world with. He is unflinchingly patient and doesn’t regret being kind. He holds my hand outside doctor’s offices, through turbulent flights, throughout protests so we don’t lose each other, and during the exact moment when something particularly heartbreaking —fires razing through poor neighborhoods, the gory massacre of activists, or disasters decimating entire provinces — comes on-screen during the evening news.
Most of the time, his gentleness is enough to calm me down without the help of panic attack pills. Instead, as my mind drifts in between states of euphoric bliss and utter devastation and then back again, just as my body picks up on the violent transition about to happen and shudders on its own as if always anticipating that everything I ever held dear will shatter anyway, he strokes my back, and I close my eyes. I imagine being onboard Voyager 1, escaping at a speed of a million miles per day, being whisked to somewhere so inconceivably far that all that has ever hurt us conflates with the surrounding nothingness, lurching on and on until Earth — with all its violence, injustice, and hateful noise — is reduced to nothing more but a pale blue dot.
***
An often told story about the Voyager 1 images was that the spacecraft carried with it a 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record carrying messages from our planet: an assembly of sounds and images including photos of inhabitants from groups of children to schools of fish, a recorded rumbling of an approaching train, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, and greetings in fifty-five different languages. The hope was that it would be received by some extraterrestrial civilization, somewhere, someday, and we’ll live to tell them more about us.
But a rarely told story was that Carl Sagan fell for a woman named Ann Druyan in 1977 while collaborating on curating these messages and that it included a recording of her brain waves pondering their love in an hour of meditation, having been captured just two days after they decided to get married. Compressed to a single minute, the recording sounds like exploding firecrackers.
I think about Sagan and Druyan’s string of decisions that led to this recording and their lifelong love affair every time I tell the story of how Pecier and I got together despite the unshakeable belief that we were headed straight and soon to the end of the world.
Pecier waltzed into my life after being an online acquaintance for years. He brought a telescope to one of our first dates and spoke for hours about constellations. I was basically transfixed. I was working my first full-time job at a climate change non-profit — idealistic and full of energy about organizing youth leaders to lobby for progressive climate policies — and so needed a reprieve. Stargazing and long nights discussing astronomy became a welcome distraction from confronting entire news cycles about extrajudicial killings, troll farms, and supertyphoons that struck our home.
The news eventually showcased so much suffering it was inescapable. I also started feeling like I had very little control of the body and mind that I lived in. I started crying about feeling helpless during therapy as a far more mentally stable Pecier waited outside for me to finish my sessions. All of the mental health professionals I approached told me the same thing: to focus on the present, the here and now, every time thinking about the future became unbearable.
But being present in the here and now — filled with headlines about impunity and worsening climate change — did not help. Climate trends continued to break records, and environmental activists who went up against corporate interest in fossil fuels continued to receive threats and intimidation. One evening, a grandmother who organized with a community we worked with against a coal plant was gunned down by still unidentified men. Everything I did felt absolutely performative when nothing really changed on the ground.
The few memories I have of the months that followed were entire days spent in bed, watching the sky switch colors, wondering if I’ll ever feel anything was meaningful again. I retreated more and more into depression and spent so much time thinking about killing myself, I did not know if I was going to make it out of 2016 alive.
***
According to scientists, there are at least two ways that the universe can collapse.
One builds on the finding that the universe is an ever-expanding fabric of space-time. According to the Big Rip model, the space between everything — galaxies from their stars, planets from their moons, down to molecules and their atoms — will infinitely expand, exploding as they pull themselves apart.
Another model suggests quite the opposite. Instead of expanding forever, the universe will reach a point where it starts to decrease over time, effectively shrinking and causing everything and everywhere to collide with each other, imploding on itself.
The word “collapse” traces its roots to the Latin medical word “collapsus,” meaning to fall together. Its most common use in English, defined as to fall or shrink together abruptly, not only means mere simultaneous destruction. For something to collapse, the devastation must be caused by a suddenness that can never be overturned, resulting in complete and total ruin.
Collapse is not incremental, like environmental degradation or mass disenfranchisement with political institutions, and so from an activism perspective, it is harder to organize support against gradual destruction when the illusion of more corrective time is always present.
We have learned to dramatize ruin through dates on our calendars. Perhaps this is easier to accept than the reality of us having fallen deaf to the screams in the background on each day that precedes our final collapse. In the Philippines, we focused on concerns over voting machines malfunctioning during the last election day, forgetting a decades-long political project that pushed out a narrative of a savior amidst widespread abject poverty. And who could ever forget about 2030, the year we’re projected to breach the infamous Paris Agreement climate target of no more than 1.5 degrees of global warming, and the statistical improbability of memorizing all the lives lost in every single climate change-intensified disaster just before?
The grand mission of preventing collapse forgets that immense suffering exists outside one cataclysmic event. Activists of color have long faulted our Western counterparts for thinking of catastrophe as a date to be plotted in the preventable future, forgetting that our present day already brims with so much pain.
If we are to construct all redemptive action as hinged on preventing only the worst that could happen, what is to become of all the days that preceded this always looming collapse, of our people’s episodic resistance to apocalypse in our own backyards? Will these pile up and finally form a revolution?
***
When Pecier and I finally intentionally made plans to meet in December 2015 after years of orbiting each other in events and on social media, our first real-life conversation lasted for eight hours. We mainly talked about our dreams. He was studying how planets formed in an astrophysics program and wanted to teach so that a new generation of Filipino scientists would get inspired to look up at the night sky with wonder. I wanted to write stories that matter and organize long enough to make a mark in the climate justice fight that I ran myself out of a job. We promptly decided to be together to make these happen.
Instead, he soon burned out and dropped out of graduate school. One day, I resigned from the non-profit job sustaining my medication and therapy with neither a savings account nor a new job lined up in the middle of a manic episode, thoroughly disillusioned with climate politics. Everything I ever believed in about myself and what movements can do collapsed. So did the sense of place I felt with Pecier.
I fell into a pattern of endless rock bottoms, only this time, I felt like I held someone hostage in my descent into madness: my hand firm around his neck, my body longing for the reprieve from its impact with the ground six feet under.
I got hospitalized again and again. We slowly and steadily racked up debt. We fought with our parents so much that we were, at times, completely isolated from our entire families. Pecier had to take on the role of my primary caregiver, putting his needs in the backseat while working multiple jobs.
Grand dreams about space exploration and delivering beautiful speeches at United Nations climate conferences seemed pointless when there was no money for rent and medication. We painfully asked what the point of everything was and how we could even dream again, but never to each other.
Our apartment grew quiet. We stopped talking for a while.
Some nights, when I was alone, I brought my knees and chest close to each other and folded as tight as possible into myself, bearing the pain in my body, imagining my own imploding.
Other nights, when he was sound asleep in bed with me, I swear I heard the atoms that made up the life Pecier and I built together exploding as they were pulled farther and farther apart by all that was left unsaid.
***
Over the years, I have told the story of how Pecier and I got together so many times I lost track.
I would intentionally miss a detail here and there. Sometimes, I skip the long bus ride that lurched on to our present. I omit the multiple doctors and the persistent loan sharks. I scratch supertyphoons and energy tycoons out of the narrative, leave out the death threats from faceless Facebook accounts, and omit waves of paranoia and fear — a fear that was inconceivable until I saw how capable I was of hurting myself and the very person I wanted to love — settling into my bones.
The liberatory wayfinding over the years that followed came after admitting I was helpless against collapse if I kept believing that my time on this planet was designed to be inevitably doomed. I am the literal by-product of stars exploding and life itself persisting amidst ruin. Love endured, endures, through these, too.
We could have been kinder then, but Pecier and I are kinder to each other and ourselves now. I like to think that we have made amends to our younger selves who held on to certain dreams. We now have new shared dreams taking root — for ourselves, our shared life together, and the struggles we have committed to for people and this planet.
These days, things are looking up. Some nights, especially when the sky is clear and the parking lot near the university observatory is empty, we talk like old friends, and we do, too.
Slowly, the firecrackers return. Starlight from the past pierces the present again. An offering of love, we press our laughter and our music and every which way we have chosen to stand our ground, hold each other close, and protest against the finality of devastation into gold, hurtling it into the unknown.
Everything we have ever known has survived ruin. Everything we build from here on is home.
For Pecier, on our 8th anniversary — you are magic.