Uranography

1. Suppose I were to say I was crushed by the sky. That I was Atlas and my hands cracked into the stars. Stars made of fire and burning flesh rumbled down my arms, and it was ugly. The blanket of sky fell black over me and I fell with it down to Earth at a 7.0 magnitude.

2. Nowadays Atlas is shown instead holding up our little sphere, back bent and muscles flexed. But that’s the point of it—what would he be standing on to keep the oceans in his hands?

3. Maybe it was momentary deconstruction and reconstruction, layering himself across universes—until the sky was his feet as much as it was the sky.

4. The ocean floor is about 5-7% explored. The ocean itself only .5% explored. Despite the vastness of water, at least in the oceans there’s a conceivable “whole.” An end containing itself. Some of the deep-sea creatures that never see sunlight look terrifying, but I don’t think anywhere near as terrifying as the idea that we might be alone in the universe. Observable or otherwise.

5. I wonder sometimes if I’m preoccupied with the slow destruction of myself anyway. With tweezers pulling hair only to feel the tiny things slide out of my skin, not honestly to get rid of them. To experience a forceful coming-apart. To see the red spots left on my legs.

6. Books are known to fade and become weaker in the sunlight. Wedding clothes too. Paintings. For precious objects, find instead a cool, dark space.

7. My oldest books rest against a blue wall in my room, where the setting sun-rays hit just right to fade and weaken their binding. Thrift store Shakespeare collections. A copy of Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, published 1882, owned by my great-great-aunt or -uncle on my father’s side. I want to move them, but they’ve been there so long. I don’t know where I could put them.

8. When I was little my brother and I thought we could find anything in our garage. There were old boxes of cookbooks, clearance silver necklaces. Easter baskets and dusty computer drives. Garbage cans full of not-quite-garbage. We never knew what we were going to find! But eventually we grew up, and cleaned up, and realized nothing useful ended up in the cool, dark spaces.

9. Things are supposed to fall apart, we say.

10. Once I visited a Catholic church in San Diego. Sunlight weaseled through the stained glass, speckling itself over the opposite pews. Maybe the wood would fade in a few years. The reds and oranges felt like fire in the heart of the chapel. I lit a prayer candle under the outstretched hands of some saint (Mary?) for the death of my friend’s father. All of the tea lights flickered down and sighed back up in a little remembrance. A remembrance of—something, I hope.

11. Horses can run through fire if provoked. Mothers can run through fire if provoked too. Self-help seminars say you, Insignificant, can become magnificent—a fire-walker!—with only the power of your mind.

12. Black takes so much ink. In theory blackness is an absence, but a starry sky in a window of plain white paper is dense, its vastness collected in the stillness of the page. Its vastness concealed in congealed wood fragments, made into comic books. “I’m significant!” writes the author, in black lines on white. A little creation, a segment of the universe.

13. Segment: one of the parts into which something naturally separates or is divided; a division, portion, or section: “a segment of an orange.” (dictionary.com)

14. Photographic paper exposed too long on purpose. Burning, it’s called. I like to cut circles out of cardboard to lay in the middle of the pictures, blackening the whole piece but that one shape and whatever it contains. More light, more darkness.

15. That’s why we go blind staring at the sun! We see too much! Maybe some neo-futurist religious white woman thought that for a moment. Maybe I thought it. The point is, we both thought it, but I can’t be sure we thought it the same way.

16. My friend’s couches, brightly colored, smelled like some sweet sickness. The cigarette smoke only drifted in a mist through the window, but it found its way into the cotton. To him it was just smoke. I had to be okay with it then, but occasionally I smell a smoker’s clothes on the train. It smells like static build-up strong enough to burn hair and skin.

17. I feel like maybe he started to embrace dying as a side-effect of smoking.

18. The leaves didn’t turn until first snow one year. Even then, the yellow bones were stuck ringing with ice to the branches.

19. The skies were like ice that year too. They crackled and solidified beneath me—in appropriate Atlas fashion—and I was trapped between 43 shades of blue water and black space.

20. We are so much emptiness. Our atoms are more space than proton and electron.

21. This would lead one to wonder about the molecular mechanisms of touch, since it is obviously not just gears tugging our nerves toward each other.

22. I feel like I am so close, I say to myself, and I am. I feel like I can be protected in a loved one’s arms. But that emptiness drifts into my mind and I want to force my electrons into their atomic space instead of merely holding “close enough”. All of our emptiness together. It’s a stronger distance than my closeness can really be. It terrifies me.

23. But I want to think about things called “beautiful.” I don’t want my fears to be all I see. All you know.

24. All I know.

25. “Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?” (Thoreau)

26. Still, fearing one touch is all it would take, I try not to imagine reaching into the void of the sky. I reach for an arm’s length, not for the distant stars.

27. If our physical bodies are supposed to be silver mist, erased by a northward breeze, they are at least beautiful diluted by the morning sun. By tea light candles. By small somethings within our atomic space. Small somethings within the space of memory.

28. One summer my boyfriend and I went to see a movie in his dumpy truck. It was our first time going (we both forgot the address of the theater). He took a wrong turn past a copper field of grain, the sun just above the Oquirrhs. On that day the sky actually felt like freedom. A good openness, for once. I moved my hand against the whipping air and slid right through it. No sensation of it slipping through me. Just hot air, new streets, and a laugh.

29. Even if the comfort of our touch is an illusion, it’s still a comfort. And some sort of touch.


My first workshop piece for my fiction class, based on the format of Bluets by Maggie Nelson.