The Last Planet: an Evening Meditation on a Murderer's Trajectory

I.  The Canter (not center) of Creation

Let me back up.

In the Beginning, God's Bright Explosion freed googles of particles.

The Original Idea boomed as all celebrations do. Heaven's farm gate was creaking open. And suddenly, billions and billions of hooves were thundering, drumming, stampeding against confinement. The Big Bang.

Heaven would never be small again.

They had been cast neither bright nor dark, these particles. Lit or unlit, every eager particle bolted with genius choreography.

That early darkness was rich with young, strong heartbeats, sweet worlds and babies yet to be born, all the beautiful possibilities of present and future creation pumping, like galloping horses and bison who are sound asleep, but moving, powerfully, reaching, stretching forward, as far and as fast as growing recombinative dreams can move.

In fits of extra inspiration, surpassing their marathon stride, all the particles of blessed urgent darkness would collectively become something new, a different, shimmering state.

God so loved the lively, licorice black-diamond eyes of this darkness that God named them Light.

Light is the champion form of darkness. Light sees, is invited, and visits space.

The blackness of infinite space and radiant light were never opposites.

Light is just darkness in love with reaching the broader pastures of God.

Light sees space, and sometimes, Light sees other things, that God never intended.

Fallen things.

II. Falling

Falling is an art.

For example, shooting stars dance a commanding ballet all the way to their own majestic demise.

Skydivers let go and arch backwards as if they have just been delivered into immortality.

Pangolins and hedgehogs curl up and roll forward without fear.

Empathetic people fall to their knees, rescuing the weak, and aiding the wounded.

Falling, in other words, potentiates blessings. If you use the unexpected stumble, obstacle, or disappointment, you can fall right into strength, grace, even wisdom.

III. Fallen

Fallen is different.

You clump your own past disadvantages and injuries like an ugly bouquet, grip and brandish them wherever you go. You propagate disaster. You want to grow humiliation and danger for other people. You put dreaded vines and seedy cabs in the paths of the vulnerable.

And when you've utterly broken something, smashed or strangled it, when you've crushed it beyond repair, you inhale deeply.

Ahhhh!, you relax, glutted and bloated as a consummate vampire. You waft the smell of death and rot around yourself, a sick congratulatory  flourish, the expensive cigar aroma of your bottom-shelf spilled blood, smellier than a poor boy's socks.

You are a particle neither dark nor light, and you go nowhere, by your own choice.

Fallen means you've chosen.

You've chosen to lust after agony, anyone's but your own.

You are a creature of the Outer Darkness. Your triumphs are not the fault or the nature of night pastures. You're who brings Hell into those lonesome, solitary places.

The mountain lions and coyotes are lambs, beside you.

You are what the old maps warn may lie beyond. Serpents, dragons--they are just approximations.

I know exactly what you are.

Murderer! You are nothing but a Fallen Thing.

IV.  Accommodations

Travelers must stop to rest.

We all fall to sleep, to renew vision.

We all fall in love, to corroborate beauty.

Look at us, always reincarnating, waking refreshed, recovering from illnesses, mending after suffering.

Our homes are only what we can see from our deathbeds. 

Our family and friends--finally, we see them better. They are all our blessings and our angels.

We leave like stars, escorted by their reassurances.

And then we become stars, lights without our old bodies.

Death is brilliant, clarifying, buoyant.

You've heard the stories from the operating rooms, of patients who remember rising above themselves, floating, detached from their troubled, collapsing accommodations, pitying the family members who can't see past the accident to the glory.

But murder?

The souls of the murdered, especially the souls of young murdered girls and boys, and of all good people, those souls are poor only momentarily. Wings and other metaphors of volition can't really conjure God's compensation.

Morgan Harrington, for example.

You quickly ascended to inhabit Light.

But your murderer is going someplace else. His trajectory is rare and horrible.

He is already headed and destined for what God and ancient astronomers might call The Last Planet.

V. Goodbye

I can not say, Fare Thee Well.

Nor do I talk like toothless gamblers and crumbling prophets of galleys and guns.

Children and hobbling Golems retaliate. They don't know better.

If we are neither, we are obligated instead to describe.

My God!

Hell is not always hot and flaming.

The cold isolation of The Last Planet is a colony beyond the worst death in the seven Star Wars.

You are the only colonist.

No one will every really sufficiently witness or characterize the freezing Hell of your eternal irrelevance.

A reporter answered me today, off record, when I asked if the Murderer I watch so carefully was--and I provided this multiple choice menu:

A. Sullen
B. Furtive
C. Weirdly Animated
D. Defiant
E. Pissed, or
F. Menacing ?

The answer was A., Sullen.

Not so much theatre, joviality, or fake note-writing in his belly-chained antics.

I think I know why.

Mommy wasn't there, this time.

Daddy was blinging in a Flavor Flav-sized silver cross.

As if the big ol' size of an ornamental hanging crucified Christ emblem redeems.

It doesn't.

There is exactly no spiritual caffeine in your vinte cross, buddy boy.

There is no defense for a cold-blooded serial murderer.

No swinging Dollar-Store bling is gonna hypnotize God.

There is no evasion that's coming last minute for the sentencing of a captured hulking Fallen Thing.

Your big stinking feet are almost as foul as your big stinking heart.

The Last Planet smells you coming.

Whew.

Disgusting.

No Yoda, no Chewbacca, no anybody beautiful like Lupita N'yongo. Nobody rescuing you.

How could they?

You're the one who has chosen the Last Planet.

We won't even wave goodbye. We like when the Force Awakens. We like turning  to better things.

There's not a sane particle in Creation who could like your fat crushing hands.

Your trajectory is now scriven in the stars, in the night sky, and in the living eyes of God.

Zoom! You're going now.

Justice is a form of Light.

God, your trajectory is fast! Galloping-fast.

You are, in an instant, The Vanishing Point.

And now, you are Nothing.

Jane Lillian Vance
Vice President, Help Save the Next Girl, and
Morgan Harrington's professor in the last Spring of her Life