When I was younger, I thought it was with me in every breath, a simple energy guiding me forward, in and out, in and out. I would play with it, caught up in its imagined grandeur, in its everyday wonder. A playground made all the difference to my beleaguered soul, and I delighted in the possibilities a swing-set could carry. Now, I swing only for nostalgia and nausea. 

Later, I thought I found the universe, leaning halfway out a hotel window and staring at the stars, my feet hooked underneath the bed frame so I wouldn't fall out - even though my entire body lay outside the window, simply enthralled by what she saw above her. It's different in country-towns, you can actually see the stars. Seeing the stars makes one think they can touch them, can reach out and snag the stardust straight from the moon itself. 

Yet since my hands only snatched at empty air, no matter how many times I sought something more, I turned to stories and books, hoping to capture the majesty of the universe with a scarce word, delicate and drifting across the page. It glimmered in the world around me, and here at last was stardust, beautiful and gentle in my hands. Even then, though, I didn't touch the truth of the universe, only its reflection - like a sunset over the water, or a lonely girl staring into a backlit mirror in a hotel bathroom.

Hotels became a theme, a longing. A place of uncertainty where maybe this time... maybe this time it'd work. But it never did. I got closer, then further and further away. No matter how tall I grew, how high I climbed, I couldn't reach it. 

Sitting in the back of a research class, our professor told us a complete population was called a universe. You could have as many universes as you wanted: women in their 60s, teenage men, cadavers, up to the entirety of Earth's population all at once. A universe, she said. I wondered, caught by the idea that here around me, everywhere, were mini universes, revolving around themselves, tumbling back again and again towards a common theme - a sun at the center of their galaxies, black holes and white holes the gravitational forces leading the way. 

Yet, it wasn't quite enough to see the world like this. To realize I could create my own universes, however great and small. Research confined the universe to the Earthly, to the immediately tangible, ignoring the existence of the millions of clusters of magic beyond our atmospheric walls. 

I've been told numerous times I don't live in a vacuum, that I need to be careful because my actions have consequences. But it screams around us daily, that massive lack of mass we call outer space, tearing into every breath. It meets us each evening, a reminder of how we pale in significance beside it. Yes, our follies touch each other, reverberating outwards through our cities and counties and states and countries and into the entirety of our planet, but at least they can't touch the universe.

We do live in a vacuum. 

Though I've spent my entire life searching for it, I'm not special. I can't touch it either. It will keep taunting and evading me, pulling further away with every fleeting touch, watching my hands glance off it and cackling its beautiful, beautiful laugh.  

Why must I chase you so? Why must you run away like this?

Some people like to think of God this way, I think. As untouchable, a vacuum far and away from us all. Cold and distant and running away as soon as we seek Him out. But I see God in the little beauties, the way the wind blows against my skin or the intricacy of a weed in the pasture. Wild blackberries in back alleyways, roses growing out of concrete. 

Perhaps God put us in a vacuum for a reason, a reason besides "well, at least they'll only blow themselves up." Perhaps if we could touch it, we'd become so caught up in the creation, we would entirely forget its Creator. 

Instead, maybe it points towards another kind of otherworldly beauty, showing us what's waiting on the other side - that there is more to this world than the cold vastness of a calculating universe constantly evading our touch.