Pattern

They keep telling me that energy cannot be destroyed.

They said it at the service. Somebody said it twice.

They said, "She's still out there, in the rain, in the light,"

and I nodded like a gentleman and went and sat in the car.

Because it's true. That's the thing. It's completely true.

Not one joule of her has left the building of the world.

The carbon's in the ground, the water's in the cloud,

the heat went out into the room and warmed it, and it's gone.

BUT THE PATTERN ISN'T ENERGY!

The pattern isn't matter, the pattern isn't heat!

The pattern was the way she said the second half of my name!

The pattern was the whole entire thing —

and the pattern is not conserved!

Don't you tell me she's the rain!

She was never once the water —

SHE WAS THE SHAPE! SHE WAS THE SHAPE!

And there is no law that keeps a shape!

Every atom of her is accounted for. Not one is lost.

You could weigh the universe before and after and it balances.

And that is exactly the cruelty of it, do you understand? —

the stuff stays. The arrangement goes.

A song is not the air. A song is what the air was doing.

Stop the doing, and the air is still all there.

Thirty-one years of a specific way of being a person,

and the ledger doesn't even notice it's been closed.

(THE SECOND LAW, gently) You are right.

Configuration is not a conserved quantity.

I have no consolation of that kind. I never did.

But I will tell you the one true thing I have.

The pattern cannot recur.

It also cannot un-happen.

For eleven thousand three hundred days

the universe contained that arrangement.

That is now a permanent fact about the universe.

It is closed. It is not erased.

Nothing that happened stops having happened.

(THE HEART, barely) ...say that again.

(THE SECOND LAW) Nothing that happened stops having happened.

And the pattern isn't energy,

and the pattern isn't coming back,

and I will not be told that she's the weather

just to make the room less hard —

but for eleven thousand days

there was a shape the world was in,

and the world was in it. The world WAS in it.

And that is in the record now, and the record does not close.