Forces – A Story of Light and Magic

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There are four fundamental forces.

Two – strong and weak nuclear – hold the elements together. Don't be mistaken; they're both quite strong but one is stronger. They make fusion, the creation of bigger elements, difficult to achieve, hence only possible in the hearts of stars and for brief moments in the hearts of our bombs.

The other two are electromagnetism and gravity. These are artists – often misunderstood and mysterious and despite being mostly predictable, capable of surprising beauty.

Electromagnetism enables, wait for it... electricity and magnetism, a pair of tricks some smart people figured out are shadows of each other and therefore the same thing. Your body is brimming with both. It also describes how photons fill the Universe with light. Magic was the old word and remains the best way to explain how it works.

Gravity, the fourth force, is by far the weakest, the simplest, and the one closest to what some call God. It's the sculptor of the Universe. Unlike the other three, it works over vast distances. It's caused when mass distorts the fabric of space-time, creating curves upon which other mass is drawn. At certain angles you get collisions. At others you get orbits and spin – vital motions by which we measure time. Days (spin) and years (orbit). Thus our Universe has shape, rhythm and something to do.

Despite all that, it's the weakest of the four because you can overcome it. Lift your arm; you're a god.

They give me comfort. The two nuclear forces keep our atoms from flying apart. Electromagnetism powers cells, illuminates the dark and is the ink in which memories are written. Gravity created the Sun and the Earth and keeps us tethered to the ground where the food and love is.

It's a lot to be grateful for, to exist. Other than brief flashes, I haven't been grateful for existence so I'm new to the feeling. It's an active practice that on some days I forget to do.

I arrived at it through a hard-fought battle with another set of forces, one with far more complexity and turmoil, more mud and poison and possibility – the forces of humanity. It's a boil of nonsense, not all bad, not all good, rarely gentle and it can be especially aggressive to tender minds like in children, the very people least capable of recognizing the wrong or of expressing confusion and pain. This is what we call innocence. It's worthy of protection, despite the inevitability that we all lose it.

Perhaps lost isn't the right term. Phase-shifted maybe? Like how water becomes steam or ice, time and biology force us into our adult bodies with our adult minds and to do adult things like get old and open mail and worry.

That's normal. Standard.

Because of some 'not good' forces set loose long before I was born, I was exposed to emotional radiation that emptied my atmosphere of its protective coating, like a planet too close to its sun. My innocence blown bit by bit into the emptiness of space where it's useless. I grew up far too young than was fair. I worried far too much about things no child should. I was influenced by forces I neither knew of nor could detect. It left my head wired in a way no person deserves.

The details are many but now is not the time. Here's the core of it: I was never taught I matter.

Only after these last two years during which I've clawed my way back, bloody broken fingernail by bloody broken fingernail, to more stable ground have I gained insight and perspective on what happened. I've forced the growth I didn't get when I was a kid, a difficult and painful process. I was on the precipice of suicide, an act of irrational self-mercy, fueled by the escalating madness of addiction, an act of irrational self-medication, underscored by the isolation inherent when suffering has no symptoms outside the skin, when it's riddled with shame and denial and only exists between the wet walls of one's skull.

A brain is a tiny Universe of its own and in some the forces compel peaceful silent orbits. In others violent collisions. Thoughts, patterns, pathways and predilections. We all get a mix of both, a ratio that serves as a sentence and predictor of outcomes.

Like our artist friend gravity, it's subtle yet powerful and ranges over vast distances, sending in motion consequences that endure for decades. If your brain doesn't know you matter, you don't know you're supposed to. Only raw, unmined, deep-inside-every-goddamned-animal's-core self-preservation got me the help I needed when I needed it. It was ask or die.

I leapt off a cliff and a hand was waiting. On my list of gratitudes, that hand is number one. Always will be.

Thanks to therapy and reflection and many deep dives into the algal lagoon of my past have I been able to even partially grasp what happened. It wasn't death I wanted after all. It was relief.

I hid my hurt because someone close to me didn't protect me from hers and I refused to hurt others in the same way. My own pain meant nothing. Besides, it was normal. What I didn't understand was it was a needless sacrifice. It festered and rotted and surprised everyone after it tumbled out like a gush of intestines. One of the moments I healed most was in my dad's car on the way home from the airport: I told him I'd been hiding this pain since I was a kid. I told him how confused and scared I've been. I told him I wasn't angry. I just needed someone who cared to hear me for the first time. He didn't try to fix it, he heard me. I waited in the car until the tears dried. We had chinese food.

In defiance of the forces that shaped me, I insist on being worthy. Of peace. Of calm. Of love. Of health. Of forgiveness. Of existing.

Work remains and the task is far from finished but clear weather looms in a mind that didn't even consider it an option. I've begun to rewire the ratio. Depression still arrives like chaos-causing thunderstorms but they are further apart and each hides a nugget of truth: you are stronger than you think. I steal those nuggets and squirrel them away for the next storm.

A good man is trapped inside me. My life's mission is to meet him. To become him. To free him. He knows how sorry I am.

I still hurt. I still crave. Fulfillment remains unfilled. Loneliness aches. I want to weep in someone's arms. I want to be held. I want warmth to look forward to. I want someone's hand to touch my face, someone's fingers to find mine. Fingertips are electricity dispensers, hence the tingle of touch. I want the mutual joy of each other's silence and screams. I want the hurry to hurry.

I'm a heart without an orbit, hoping to find one, to pull close, circle gently – the dance of gravity – bound by a force that sculpts matter into beauty.