The Tall But True Tale of Jane Gravity: The Woman Responsible for Gravity

A few centuries ago, gravity did not exist. While that might seem entirely unthinkable now, as recently as the time of our Founding Fathers, everything floated around the air with no end in sight. This led to a world that was very different from our own. Planets weren’t even a thing, since there was no gravity to pull the material together. This did have its benefits, as you could reach ridiculously far distances with a single jump, and there was no fall damage in real life or video games, which did exist at the time. However, life was not without its downsides, such as the fact that all of the video games floated away one time and they didn’t come back until recently. Lots of other things floated away actually, like most babies, which was why infant mortality was so high back then. The more I think about it, the downsides definitely outweighed the benefits.

The world before gravity was a difficult one, and people knew that something wasn’t right, but they just couldn’t put their finger on it, like most things, because the world is very big, fingers are very small, and we don’t have a lot of time in this life. Concepts similar to gravity existed, but only in fiction, and without name. Due to a mandate from the Catholic Church, all paintings under their rule were painted from a perspective of an idealized world where things stayed where they were and didn’t float away, which is what the Catholic Church assumed heaven was like at the time. Many mandates like this existed across cultures, which is why today it seems that we have always had gravity. Individuals also tried to put the concept of gravity into words, but none succeeded. Sir Isaac Newton almost invented a theoretical concept known as “Stay-Put”, but he floated away before he could finish his research.

Now all of this might make you wonder, how did we get gravity? And the answer to that question starts at the birth of a woman called Jane Gravity. As her mom, Ethel Gravity was in the hospital giving birth, a doctor was across the room from her with a large net, ready to prevent the newly-birthed baby from ricocheting around the room and deforming its skull or any other malleable part of its body, like the rest of it. However, when Jane was born, she did not ricochet around the hospital room, but instead, she fell on the ground, horrifying everyone, because this had literally never happened before. For some reason, whether that be genetic, a side effect of Ethel smoking while pregnant, or something that makes even less sense, Jane had been born with gravity. As for the fact that Jane, a zero second old baby, had fallen head-first directly onto the cold, hard concrete floor of a hospital, don’t worry about it. She was very durable.

The story of Jane Gravity’s birth had spread far and wide quicker than molasses. Way quicker actually, which makes this a bad metaphor, but I’ve been taught to make a choice and stick with it. Soon, Jane became a worldwide legend for having this thing now referred to as “Gravity”. Her everyday outfit of overalls became so synonymous with her that you could hardly wear them without people bringing her up. Gravity, once a common surname, was now used to refer to the property that only she had. This property was so unfamiliar that several increasingly strange metaphors had to be created for the general public who had never seen her in person to comprehend her existence. Of course you could always just draw a diagram of a Jane and draw an arrow pointing down under her, but this was lost on certain people who thought that Jane just had a pointed devil-tail sticking out of her. Some people compared her gravity to the season of fall because like how fall changed from summer to winter, gravity changed Jane from in the air to not in the air. This is the reason that fall is a word that describes a downward movement. This metaphor still didn’t connect with everyone, so some people compared her gravity to romance, the way she was attracted to the ground. However, some people still didn’t understand that this was a metaphor, and thought that she was famous for marrying a large chunk of dirt and grass.

Jane had a lot of adventures throughout her life. So many, that I can’t even begin to tell all of them here, so I’ll just give you the best. As a child, Jane once found herself thousands of miles above the Earth’s surface due to a large gust of wind flinging her school out of the atmosphere. While this was a common situation that didn’t impact most of the students’ lives, this was a big deal for Jane. While she was at recess, another gust of wind blew Jane away, causing her to fall thousands of miles towards the Earth at a massive velocity. While this should have been the end of Jane Gravity, she only ended up with a few minor scratches. However, her impact was so massive that it created what today we call the Central Valley of California.

Another time, Jane was being studied by doctors and scientists to see if they could figure out why she had gravity and if they could give it to other people. This didn’t go well, because Jane’s gravity was so mysterious that we still don’t know how she got it. One scientist suggested blending her into an ooze and misting it over the whole world so that everything had gravity. Another suggested terraforming Earth into a sphere with her at the center. Another suggested that she was just a witch and that she should be burned at the stake before she could spread gravity to other people like an STD. All of these ideas and theories annoyed Jane so much that she jumped out of the window and plummeted towards the Earth, this time separating the UK and Ireland from the rest of mainland Europe and turning them both into islands. While Jane was glad to be away from the scientists, she did understand their intentions. While she was always getting into dangerous adventures because of her gravity, if everything had gravity, life would be much better off. She knew that she had to be the key to solving this problem, but she just didn’t know how. All she knew is that it likely wasn’t being compressed into a fine mist and spread around the planet.

One day, Jane got distracted by an incredibly ugly bird with two left wings and no feathers and fell accidentally off the edge of the Earth, into the wonderful and endless cold nothingness of space. Jane traveled for days and days, falling and falling into an ever expanding void. Eventually it got boring, but the view was so beautiful that she couldn’t complain. She also couldn’t complain because there was no one around to hear her and sound doesn’t travel in space. While Jane was falling, she wondered about where she would end up. She hoped she would end up on a planet where everyone had gravity. This would not happen. Jane would fall for years and years, until eventually, she reached the bottom of the universe. Now, the bottom of the universe was very empty, which Jane quickly discovered, but she couldn’t help but feel like there had to be something, anything, down there.

Jane searched for an unknowable time, because no clocks had ever flown even close to the bottom of the universe and I wasn’t there with a stopwatch counting how long she spent down there. Eventually, after Jane had searched for some really long amount of time, she spotted something. It was small, but that made it infinitely bigger than the nothing that surrounded her. As she got closer, she discovered that it was a hole in the universe. She peered through it to see what was on the other side, and all of a sudden the hole grew bigger and swallowed her up into the fabric of the universe itself. Jane was stretched and twisted thin across the entire universe, with her entire essence being incorporated into the fundamental nature of everything. If this were to happen to any ordinary human, not much about the universe would change, but Jane was no ordinary human. Gravity was now a part of the universe itself, not just Jane. In a fraction of a fraction of a second, everything began to fall to the ground and compact into itself. The Earth, once a flat plane of dirt and rock islands, had now formed into a sphere, but the people did not fall off, because of gravity. While it took some adjustment (millions of people died, buildings were destroyed, people were stranded on distant planets, etc.), eventually, a new, less chaotic normal started to form.

As for Jane? She turned out fine. While any other person would be killed by becoming a thread in the fabric of the universe, Jane was something special. She even ended up back on Earth after being absorbed by the cosmos. After tumbling around there for a while, the universe spit her back out exactly where she left. Now at this point, she was just a regular, if incredibly durable person, but that didn’t bother her. She was just glad that everyone finally got to experience gravity along with her.