The Infinite Starr

Perhaps the cruelest thing God ever did was remember everything.

Imagine eternity with no locked doors.

No unanswered questions. No accidents. No wrong turns. No lovers who leave before morning. No death waiting somewhere beyond the candlelight. No possibility that the thing standing in the shadows might actually hurt you.

You know everything.

You are everything.

And nothing can happen to you that you did not already know was going to happen.

At first, it would be magnificent.

That is the idea Alan Watts played with when he asked us to imagine having the ability to dream any dream we wanted.

Tonight, you could dream a hundred years.

Tomorrow night, a thousand.

Eventually, time would become irrelevant because you would have trillions upon trillions of years available to you.

So naturally, you would begin beautifully.

You would dream yourself into castles with black marble floors and chandeliers dripping diamonds over endless tables. You would have bodies that never aged and lovers who never betrayed you. You would walk barefoot through gardens that bloomed only at midnight. You would command oceans to part simply because you wanted to see what lived beneath them.

You would be adored.

Desired.

Feared.

Worshipped.

You would create entire worlds because the afternoon had become boring.

And every single one of them would end exactly as you wanted.

For a while, that would be heaven.

For a few million years, perhaps.

But eternity is a very long time to always get your way.

Eventually you would sit upon the throne you created, surrounded by everything you ever wanted, and realize something terrible.

This sucks.

Because nothing means anything when nothing can be lost.

Winning becomes meaningless when losing is impossible.

Being chosen means very little when rejection does not exist.

Courage becomes theater when you already know you cannot die.

Love becomes predictable when you control the heart of the person standing across from you.

Even pleasure begins to rot when there is no pain against which to recognize it.

So you would begin experimenting.

Maybe tonight you let someone tell you no.

Interesting.

Tomorrow, perhaps you dream that someone leaves.

That hurts.

How strange.

Again.

Next time you make yourself poor.

Then frightened.

Then lonely.

You create a dream where you have to work for what you want.

Another where you almost get it and lose it at the last possible second.

You begin putting monsters beneath the bed.

You invent betrayal.

You create storms.

You allow yourself to make terrible decisions simply to experience the consequences.

You dream yourself standing at graves.

You create heartbreak so convincing that for a moment you almost forget you invented the lover.

Almost.

But there is still a problem.

Somewhere beneath all those magnificent nightmares, you still know.

You know you are God.

You know the monster cannot really eat you.

You know the grave isn’t permanent.

You know the person who shattered your heart was placed inside the dream by you.

You know there is an exit.

And knowing ruins everything.

So after another few million years, you become more ambitious.

You decide to create the one experience you have never truly had.

Not suffering.

Not death.

Not poverty.

Not heartbreak.

Uncertainty.

But there is only one way an all-knowing being can experience uncertainty.

It has to forget.

And that may be where the real dream begins.

You close your eyes somewhere outside of time and surrender the one thing you have always possessed.

The knowledge of what you are.

You bury it so deeply inside yourself that even when you go looking for it, you cannot quite find it.

Then you wake up here.

Human.

No memory of having chosen the century.

The body.

The parents.

The lovers.

The enemies.

The strange little house.

The terrible Tuesday.

The person who broke your heart.

The opportunity you missed.

The thing you begged the universe to give you that never arrived.

Suddenly everything matters because you don’t know how it ends.

Now when someone loves you, your heart races because they might stop.

When someone leaves, it hurts because you don’t know whether anyone else is coming.

When the doctor calls, your hands shake.

When the phone rings at midnight, your stomach drops.

When you stand at the edge of something new, you hesitate because failure has become possible.

And when something beautiful happens, you grab it with both hands because for the first time in eternity, you believe it might disappear.

That is the trick.

Maybe mortality was never the punishment.

Maybe forgetting was the price of admission.

Because what would a sunset mean to something that could create a billion of them?

What would a kiss mean if you had already experienced every possible kiss?

What would your mother’s voice mean if you knew you could hear it whenever you wanted?

What would five minutes mean to someone possessing eternity?

Nothing.

Until you forgot.

Then suddenly five minutes becomes everything.

Perhaps that is why humans spend so much of their lives desperately trying to know.

We read cards.

Study stars.

Ask psychics.

Pray.

Analyze dreams.

Look for signs in birds and numbers and strangers.

We ask whether the relationship will survive.

Whether the job will work out.

Whether the money is coming.

Whether we made the right decision.

Whether the dead are still somewhere.

Whether everything is going to be okay.

We want someone to hand us the script.

And maybe somewhere beyond the veil, something is laughing.

Not cruelly.

Tenderly.

Because we spent eternity writing the script and became so bored with knowing the ending that we buried it from ourselves.

We begged for this uncertainty.

We wanted the dark hallway.

We wanted the locked door.

We wanted to hear something breathing on the other side without knowing whether it was a monster or someone coming home.

We wanted mistakes.

Real ones.

We wanted consequences.

We wanted the terrifying freedom of choosing without knowing.

So perhaps the purpose was never to become God.

Perhaps the great cosmic joke is that you already were.

The challenge was becoming human enough to forget.

And every now and then, something slips through.

A moment of déjà vu.

A dream too vivid to dismiss.

A stranger who feels strangely familiar.

A place you’ve never visited that somehow feels like home.

A coincidence so precise you stop walking.

A moment when the noise disappears and you feel, for no logical reason whatsoever, that everything is exactly where it is supposed to be.

Then the curtain closes again.

Because remembering too much would spoil the dream.

You have to believe the loss is real.

You have to believe the choice matters.

You have to believe tomorrow is uncertain.

Otherwise you would become that bored god again, sitting upon an eternal throne surrounded by perfect things, desperately wishing something unexpected would happen.

So here you are.

Imperfect.

Confused.

Occasionally heartbroken.

Making decisions with incomplete information and calling it life.

Maybe you didn’t come here to figure everything out.

Maybe you came here because once, somewhere beyond memory, you already knew everything.

And after trillions of years of perfect dreams, perfect lovers, perfect victories and perfect endings, you finally whispered the most dangerous request an immortal being could make:

Make me forget.

And something in the darkness answered,

As you wish.