surface

surface

"How do you tell if you're not who you thought you were?"

A childhood image, a moment that stands out, that pulls you like gravity.

"I remember the first time camping, when she showed me the Big Dipper, and it was so easy to draw the lines, and I know that I could never again look at those stars without seeing the image."

Some days all I see is a random assortment of light.

She told me that the stars weren't really there. That those stars are only the light shed from years and years ago. That for how large the universe is, the light might as well pour like molasses. It frightens me, that light is simply the memory of movement. That the night sky is little more than a graveyard of ghostly reflection.

I'm scared that someone a light year away might look close enough, see under the telescope the light reflecting what I once was, pining away for you in a hotel room, even though you’re right here in my arms, at this very moment, talking to me in your sleep. Helping me through these issues with your eyes closed.

That they might see what I still can’t explain, how when no one was watching, we became children. In a very real sense, smaller than the world around, hidden from everyone's view, outside of the occasional homeless man. Distances more challenging because of our tiny statures, doors more difficult to open, the right words harder to come by.

Those future astronomers will see us cross-legged on the carpet, filling that space with rhymes and sing-song, sugar high, and soaring.

"No," I would have said. "I don't know how you can tell if you're not who you always thought you were."

Her face, darkened as the sun fades behind the apple orchards, her face like the last throes of a struggle. Her face and her hair and her tiny shaking hands.

She would have risen, smooth like vascular pressure, up from the cross-legged position, neither leaning forward nor using her hands. She would have walked to the nightstand and took the yellowed phone, its green buttons glowing more brightly now with the night that would have been approaching. This would have been a very long time ago.

"It's me."

She would have struggled.

"Because you gave up."

She would have lost her balance.

"No, we didn't. We never did. It never was."

She would have leaned forward.

"I’m hanging up now."

She would have dropped the phone into the receiver. She would have surprised those astronomers with her sudden change, how she would have advanced in age and demeanor. And they would have tapped the eyepiece, convinced that the light must have been pulled by the force of gravity, too near some rapidly falling body.