Like ash from a burned-out wildfire, humanity drifts away. The weightless world inside continues beyond the skulls that birthed and nurtured that world for 300,000 years.

Eons labor. Time cuts planets to rubble and whips stars to luminous smoke that eases into darkness.

The angels of atoms spread their wings and carry protons and neutrons into a vacuum deeper than nothing.

They arrive at the heaven of unending: thermal equilibrium – where the persuasion of black holes relents and gives up the memory of all that ever was.

And maybe the entire misery was for this: that everything we robbed from the earth and dragged into the light, all the blessings and horrors, would illuminate again the weightless world that outlasted us.