It's so much

silviana amethyst

It’s So Much

by Silviana Amethyst

read at the 2024 MPI-CBG Christmas party.

Christmas poem 2024

This holiday season, 2024, I have so much for which to be grateful and hopeful.

* For my past friends and family, including past Silviana, for making the decisions, both selfish and selfless, that brought us together here today
* For my current friends and family, including present Silviana, and YOU, for showing up, being present, supportive, and loving as we work towards goals bigger than any one of us can behold.
* For my future friends and family, whoever they are, whoever future Silviana is, and whoever you will be, for welcoming, forgiving, understanding, and trusting.  For stepping up, for loving fearlessly.  
So I give you this holiday poem.

---

It's so much, so big, huge, incomprehensibly massive.  
So small, so microscopic, vanishingly unfathomably minuscule.  
All of it together, this project, to understand and predict,  
to categorize and project, to uncover and prosper.  

A process of  
reshaping,  
folding,  
melting,  

twisting, toroiding,  
scaling and symmetrizing,  

inwards and together.  

Inseparable as the strands of DNA.  But we know the strands DO separate replicate duplicate.  
Our human bonds,   
our shared fate,  
our destiny of togetherness,  
simultaneously arresting and accelerating.  

Y'all, I gotta tell you, I just LOVE the Weinachtsmarkt, laughing and drinking and beholding as one, followed by fingers and toes so numb they take 20 minutes in a hot bath to thaw.  Getting into a cold bed alone, in an apartment alone, kept company by a stuffed cat I pretend is Deku, thousands of kilometers from any family, but so surrounded by love that I am sure I will be warm, and so I get warm, and thus I fall asleep.

Freshly fallen snow, surrounded by a thousand thousand little lights  
All white but simultaneously a trillion trillion prismatic rainbows  
Poke at my retinas  
Drawing my attention to something infinitely more  
Enrapturing than the stupid fucking screen of my phone.

Rain when there should be snow  
Socks when your feet should be bare  
A pencil when you need a pen  
A god when you need a friend  
A fart when you need to shit  
A keyboard on which there's a dedicated button for making the section symbol  
Generative AI when you need local news  
An existential proof when you need an algorithm  
Free parking when you don't own a car  
Santa, when we need real leadership  
Efficiency when we need joy  
Dwindling time, and we're running out.

Once upon a time, an epoch, a duration, an age  
A chord of states emerged from nothing  
Symmetry broke, and 14 billion years later  
Symmetry is all around us  
From the smallest scale to the largest  

Symmetry from asymmetry  
Color from a prism  
Order from disorder  
Music from noise  
Freedom from a prison  
Stability from instability  
Durability from fragility  
Knowledge from information  
Treasure from rubbish  
Hope from despair  
Stillness from motion  
Peace from partition  

To realize that all progress is reversible  
That my time with you is fleeting  
That my paper will crumble  
And yet here we are together,   
   so different 
   yet 
   so wonderfully united, 
working on this unimaginably large project  
Makes me treasure you all the more.