Hannah/saying/things

Is as sacrifice to a black hole. There’s only one option, the closest one, Gaia BH1, and even that is too far away to reach in any one human lifetime. So, pipe dream, bummer. 

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I first wondered about being swallowed up by space at some summer camp in central Kansas, wearing shorts, sweat down my back, lying out in the grass with the unfettered afternoon sky above me. It’s like I was wearing the earth as my backpack, or hanging off of the edge of it, strapped onto a rollercoaster, my feet dangling. Did you know we are hurtling through space at inconceivable speeds, that the rotation of planets around a sun isn’t a circle, isn’t even really an ellipses, it’s a squiggly line, it’s impossibly fast, and we don’t feel any of it. 

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It’s nearly summertime in Chicago but only now does it even feel like spring. I am very twenty-six. This is the summer where I read fairytales about California, about friendship and excess, about light and heat and smoke and lots of drugs. I don’t know, it’s easy to get lost in it. I’m pretty risk-averse in my own life but I like reading about dangerous things, life-ruiners.

It’s cold in space, I think. There isn’t any sound. You couldn’t get further from California or Chicago summer if you tried. 

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Since I was young I’ve always liked being on my own. I thought I mapped out every square inch of Kansas City while I was living there but now I’m twenty-six and not so sure. Though, I do think it’s unfathomably small, now, considering all of these other places I’ve been and still not even scratched the surface of the rest of it. 

I picked up and put down all sorts of habits in Kansas City. I lived in some houses and some apartments and then there were places I only half-lived. I have slept on mattresses on the floor behind gauzy curtains, have cluttered my windowsills with candles and rocks, have locked myself away in these places and drifted away from the world. 

There were miles of grass around the museum, shopping malls in Spanish architecture, the old train station with its big windows and clock, the cross-shaped one-story building where I spent at least twelve years and remember twelve seconds of it. My friends’ houses exist, there, in eternal stasis, with their painted walls, dried flowers tacked onto them, wrap-around porches and bug-repellant candles, outdoor grills, too-green grass, swimming pools, nothing at all to save us from the sky. 

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Once, when telling someone younger than me about my dream, they asked what it is I would be getting sacrificed for. 

I’ve seen Interstellar and I’ve watched my fair share of video essays and explainers on theoretical physics. I’m not completely an idiot. I know there’s no coming back from the event horizon, not for anything. Not for light, not for sound, not for data, not for my brain or the things I learn; what it looks like, what it does to my body, what is on the other side, what it all means. So, who slash what is this sacrifice for? 

Maybe some lucky scientist, now stranded in the big blue-black, watches the edges of me stretch thin as hair but never snap, which they call spaghetti-fication but who knows what it looks like. Well, they’d know. 

I’d be suspended like that forever. If you think that intergalactic spaceship voyage was long, that’s an eye blinking in comparison. According to onlookers, anyway.

For me, it would only take however long it took.

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In Texas, even the green of the palm trees fizzled with heat. The San Antonio River smelled like a waterpark ride, that is to say, not very good. The only time I visited the Alamo was during a protest about something else.

But St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost things and that is exactly what I was when I got there. I was just beginning to learn about theoretical physics, I even bought a textbook on the introductory math though I abandoned it pretty quickly. Sophie and I lived there together with yellow curtains nailed up above the windows.

On my twenty-fifth birthday we went down to the Gulf, and slept about ten of us to a single house, and set up a tent in the sand and sat in a circle in the water and I could have been anywhere, in any body of water. I imagined I was in Italy, though I have no idea what that would be like. I was sitting in about a foot of water and the water extended in every direction as far as I could see and the sky was a different shade of blue than it was in Kansas. I knew I would get sunburned but I didn’t expect a jellyfish to wrap its arms around my one arm, and then I was running out of the water, and it was hurting just about the way you’d imagine.  

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The light on this planet is so bright, looking into the snow and having it look back at you, even diffused through clouds, even off of white pavement, even as the sun is some ninety-three-million miles away. 

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I was pretty sad and young in Arkansas. I forget about that but it happened. 

I went everywhere on foot, including the center median of a highway when I tried and failed to take the bus to a bookstore. My phone died, I was crying, the cars were so fast on either side of me and I knew I’d die if I tried to make it the rest of the way, and I didn’t try, despite everything I’d been feeling. 

Really, this was the first place I ever ran to. It was kind of just a direction to go in, that a lot of people I knew were going in, and I knew it was beautiful there, and that there were artists slotted in there somewhere between the frat boys and sorority girls.  

My dorm room had cinderblock walls and looked out over the stadium, over the frat houses. I watched a progression of pledges running drunkenly down the hill towards their new homes from my place high above all of it. 

It’s getting tougher and tougher to remember things further back than age twenty. I must have been nineteen then. 

I remember the small classroom where I met with a psychology student for free and she asked me questions I didn’t know the answers to. In another classroom I was supposedly learning Latin. There was a coffee shop that functioned like some sort of laboratory, a bakery draped in green vines with a small patio. I was an honors student then and had access to the honors building, which was a little more like I was hoping for out of college, with plush old couches and dark wood walls and lots of tall windows. 

There was a state park called Devil’s Den some number of miles away and on the drive there, you would find yourself in the midst of an overwhelming green that goes on and on and on. There was a stretch of I think 20 miles or so where you couldn’t get off the highway if you tried, unless you wanted to tumble down, one wheel over another, into those green trees, which I didn’t try, despite everything I’d been feeling. 

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Every new place I go, they ask me, So, what are you doing here? And I hate when they ask that question because I always panic for a second and then say something and am not sure if what I said was true. I do this because I’m not sure I know the answer. And I don’t know why this is so much harder for me than it seems to be for anyone else. Not in Arkansas, not in Texas, not in Chicago, not even in Missouri or Kansas. Never have I known how to communicate why I was where I was, not while I was there, not even after.

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I am twenty-six. I don’t know how or when I got this old except it was yesterday, maybe two days ago, and I am just fine with it, because I never really imagined what twenty-six would look like and so I finally am something that I cannot compare anything else to. 

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In Chicago, I wake early and sit on the couch where the sun rays fall like they’re falling through water, and I listen to the radio and drink coffee from a pot, or ginger turmeric tea. I take the train or bus or walk. It was a very long and cold winter, like they tell you, but what they do not tell you is how it feels when spring yawns its way to waking, much later than it does anywhere else I have been, how very green the trees are when they touch overhead, how there are so many flowers, how you really can smell them.

So, what brought you to Chicago?

There’s a lake on the East side which is the size of the entire world. It was the first time I came here, scoping it out, because I was still in Texas but knew it was some to go somewhere else. I think now that the pilot was stalling for time, waiting for landing clearance, but that doesn’t change what happened to me when we flew out over Lake Michigan, with its subtly cresting waves, that rich, crystalline blue, and I felt as if my breath had been taken away, I had no idea it was so big, I had no idea I was so small.

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Gaia BH1, which I will never go to while I’m alive, although we’re all going there someday, I think. I’d just like to get there first. The last place no one’s ever been. The last place I will ever go. The most alone I will ever be. 

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This was Kansas at my grandmother’s house. The lingering smell of cigarette smoke in the garage, the Sisyphusian puzzle atop the folding table in front of the TV. The wood-and-felt children’s theater tucked away in the basement, which we used to suspend in one doorway or another, tell stories I don’t remember using hand puppets. The matching set of standing mirrors which watched me grow. 

There was a big record player in the carpeted basement, alongside old couches and a fireplace and a small trampoline for us kids to jump on. I had no use for the built-in bar in the corner until I was old enough to sneak down there during holidays, which I learned when I was old enough was sort of a family tradition, because there was always liquor and wine in the fridge in the basement and no one questioned when it disappeared and it was always replenishing itself. 

The last day I ever spent in that house was sometime after my grandmother died, and I went through the whole place with a small, cheap camera and took photos of everything that mattered to me. I couldn’t be there for the funeral itself because I was living in Texas just then, but we held a sort of reception in that house and all sorts of people showed up, some who I knew, others I didn’t.

I took two leather-bound books and a couple of oil paintings and this creepy doll that looks something like an old-timey rendition of a medievel jester, wearing a puffy green-and-gold outfit and slippers that curl up at the toe. 

That is all I have left of this place, those things and the pictures, and when I think about it, it makes my stomach turn to think of the way it all disappeared when they sold it, just like that, swallowed up by nothing, until all that was left lived inside me, not even in the pictures, not even in those physical things, but in my memory, which gets worse and worse, so I am trying so, so hard not to forget. 

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It would be a beautiful way to die. I wouldn’t be able to see the earth, but even if I could, that light would be pre-historic, maybe I’d catch the moment the meteor hit. You are always seeing a different world depending on where you are, and how heavy. 

I picture it magnificent and if it wasn’t I’d just be stuck there, and would have to accept it, stuck with my stretching body, my last few thoughts, the cold, quiet vacuum, the place that is no place at all, heading towards the point where everything is tucked in close against one another, where we’re all heading, I’d just be the first. For that endless moment, I think I’d understand some things, maybe even that thing I’ve been wondering, that’s been bothering me.

If you asked me, So, what are you doing here? I’d know at last, and I’d know for sure.