Constellations

Creative Nonfiction Prose

This piece was featured in my Creative Writing BFA Thesis entitled, Creation of Man, focusing on short memoir and creative nonfiction essays as I tackle the death of my father and my gender identity.

Word Count: 2151

My father lifts me up and I squint in order to clearly peer through a thin eye. I see the moon. It looks like it's moving so quickly through the covers of clouds, racing away. She doesn’t like revealing her secrets. I want them all; I am a spoiled child so I turn my head to follow and pull away from my father, ready to chase the moon to wherever it may lead. But as I pull away from the telescope, the moon does not move. Her secrets are never hidden, you just need to know how to look. He explains to me that the earth is spinning and we are simply victims to its gravitational pull and magnitude as we orbit through nothingness. The moon, he says, is the beacon to guide you home. Unafraid of life, I smile and look back at the stars, more interested now in that speckled space dust.

A million years ago, there is a young child on a father's lap.

A million years from now, there was a young child on a father’s lap.

And the father says to the child, this cluster of existence that against all other chances was created, that together they can understand the layers of the universe not meant for commonality. The father tells a tale of a child on their father’s lap who says that the layers of the universe happen simultaneously. Everything has already happened, will happen and is happening.

I wonder where you are, and I wonder where I am. As I stick up posters to my dorm room wall, unable to utilize the strength it takes to put up a photo of you, my roommate asks why my walls still feel so bare. How does it feel to bare your soul to strangers, I want to ask. How does it feel to have made it to college and still be completely uncertain of the steps which got you there, and I want them to have the answers. At eighteen, 2017, I thought I would be dead already. In a way, I already was. I died with you, a piece of me; maybe, the piece of me that wanted to be a storyteller.

There are often days when I reflect upon my mortality, where I find myself staring at the Boston sky searching for the stars that I could call home, absently tracing my finger around the invisible Ursa Minor. I can’t see these constellations. Those stars aren’t here anymore. I’ve never lived in a city before; I didn’t realize it sucked up the magic of night. I wonder where I am oriented in this world, where I am oriented in my own life, and if I’m following the right path that was set for me by incarnates prior. The sky is dark, the moon a reflective mirror for personal introspection but there are no stars to guide me. This isn’t home. This is a new experience, something exploding into cosmos, brilliant and terrifying power all held within the next big life step. I never thought I’d make it out of Jersey, let alone be accepted into university.

I tell my roommate that I thought I’d be dead at eighteen. That I’m not used to good things happening to me. That I’m not used to moving forward through life instead of backward. They say to me, those statements are a lot to handle on the first day.

Memories pop up sometimes, bursts of lights that pepper my mind like stars in the sky. Little specks of an infinite plane of existence that haunts me in my slumber, or my dreams, or at the worst of times when my ability to focus is stunted by the cacophony of a million other things that take up my time.

I let them paint the sky for me, forming shapes I recall and feelings I don’t:

Bruised knees and sitting in the shade, picking at blades of grass until my nails turn green, isolated from my peers in the summer air, sounds of laughing and swimming and fun all happening away from me.

Bungee cords digging into my thighs and my shoulders as I still grip on to thick leather as the wind rushes past my ears, deafening me to the rest of the world, the helmet, too large, beating against me every time we lean the take a turn on his bike.

Squirrels running through my bedroom walls, scratching and clawing, waking up with ceiling plaster on my sheets, and no one listens to my pleas of their existence as a nuisance, a distraction.

Locker bits, like the coat hanger, pressing into my scalp, ducking and squirming, and trying to find comfort in a cold, metal prison, and I don’t say anything, lean and sit and stay silent, I want to know how long it will take for the teachers to notice I’m gone, and it takes an hour despite an elementary school of thirty-five, the dark isn’t so scary, the light filters through, and I take a nap.

Strong hands pressed against my stomach, holding me up like I’m on the top of the world from the couch in our living room, arms spread out to try and fly and take off and away and grasp the world in my palm.

Sun melting into the ocean from the spring hill where I stand, waiting to end middle school, waiting to move on, waiting for something to be beautiful and reach out to me and save me, from the rooftop of the hotel, it takes all my will to keep two feet on the ground.

Tears that soak into her brindle coat, a soft muzzle and tongue against my cheek as I cry and don’t know why, don’t know what Hashem means or why he’s gone and why now and why leave me alone, and not being able to say goodbye, and how I begin to lose all that I felt was close to me.

I lose myself.

It’s good to use them, these memories, push them into a purpose and replay my life backwards. Or play my life forward in two-time. This power, the unnerving sense that only memories contain the world that I used to know, scares me. It is the only way for me to understand how everything can possibly be connected; the dotted lines that turn spectrums of light into piqued imaginations.

I stare at the stars even though they are not there.

My father, you, bought a telescope once. Or maybe twice, and maybe even never, depending on which world you want—the one where he’s alive or the one he’s dead or the one where he never even had me. For me, this particular me, my father bought us a telescope. He took my hand, guided me outside and set it on the driveway. The forest was our shield, surrounding us with its wildlife as a barrier to any that would dare break us apart.

New Jersey, 2008. He dies in a year and in nine, he turns to dust. I am young; I am confused, but the stars here are so bright and I find myself in awe at how small I actually am, just a speck in a bigger story, like the stars. Small blinks of wonder that flicker for us to paint the map of cosmos. Burning universes and flaming supernovas, being born and dying all at the same time, give off their light for us to witness and try to understand how circular stories can be told.

Now, I see the world through that same pinhole of a telescope, but mine is wider, better. I learn Orion’s Belt, but can never see Orion. I see the Big Dipper but never the absent Little Dipper. I see Ursa Minor who misses its mama, who I cannot see in Boston’s sky. They dance up there for me, spinning as the seasons turn and time stops, rewinds and plays. It’s a solemn type of music, a mournful dance. I know the answers only years after the question has been asked. Only through a misjudged sense of humanity do any answers even reveal themselves.

My home is in those stars, in the lens of the telescope, in the stories my father would share. In a friendless environment, in a shared space of a roommate, at least, the endless vastness of space is always there too.

New Jersey, 2009. My father will die in a week. We sit on the back of his car, draped in a blanket. The telescope is broken. It stands, forgotten to be fixed, but a statue to the museum of lost gifts and opportunities. I don’t recall a time that we ever use it again. So, we gaze blindly, through our naked eyes above. There’s supposed to be a meteor shower, but the clouds, those terrible clouds hide the spectacle from me. They shield and destroy the dreams, the wishes we were supposed to make, the father-daughter childlike glee. Clouds cannot act as a blanket if they only make you colder. I shiver; in fear, in anticipation of everything I know and don’t. My father promises me that they will clear, that they must. They don’t. There’s a universe, years from now, years ago, where maybe they did. Maybe they caught them before it was too late. He takes my hand and guides me inside.

I can still view meteor showers with that same excitement but am disappointed every time. Gazing upon comets grant me no comfort if they refuse to show their face. Each time, each August, I rush outside, like a child to its father’s arms, wanting to see something, anything. I never do, or never can. Each time, I am let down.

My father is dead. My father is alive.

I am alive. Maybe I am dead too.

New Jersey, 2010. The stars are here, they stay bright. Stars gleam and blink and wave down upon me. They let me know that everything is in its place and that time doesn’t care for formalities. One day, I will know everything, who I was, who I am, who I will be. Not right now, they say, there’s still so much ahead of me. Comets never fall out of the sky. Meteors never pass by. But the stars, my only companion, stay. After he has left me, after the world continues to spin, as time continues, I am still here. My father is gone, and I still feel lost, hurtling through space. Ursa Minor knows what grief feels like. We have that in common. The Little Dipper becomes my favor, my guiding point. The moon scowls at me, I have no wish for any others.

Boston, 2017. The stars have been stolen. Between city pollution, unfamiliar to my suburb forests, I feel alone. The sky is nothing but the void between disgust and agony. I am lost, without the guidance, unable to orient myself in my space. Orion’s Belt slips from my fingers. Big Dipper runs dry. Ursa Minor hibernates forever. And my father’s telescope was fixed, but there is no child to learn from its messages and tales. The dark abyss that greets me each time, each time I close my eyes, is simply the new way of living. I haven’t grasped that yet. Nightmares keep me awake, and my roommate doesn’t care. Millennia can pass, yet I am still learning how to be whole. Right now, I’m supposed to learn but I can only reflect upon a mirror of my own splitting image. If I pretend, then I can be.

In the past, we saw starlight for the time it took to reach us. I will be in the past, was in the current, and am in the future as the stardust inside me spins with the universe. Just like my father taught me, I am a victim to my own morality.

Can you feel it? Can you see the stars in the sky that willingly guide you towards remembering?

There are no stars, and you can’t see them because they aren’t there; they’ve left.

Boston, 2017. I wonder about my father’s telescope, lying dormant in a house that once belonged to me, but no longer. I wonder if it can still teach my mother the things she refuses to acknowledge. My mortality is an issue I quite contemplate, curiously intended on knowing everything I can. There is something that stops me, clouds over my memory and emotions. And I find myself still disgusted with clouds and their coldness, the shame they hide but I am not strong enough to rip myself from them. It’s a new night but the same one from so many stories past and future.

I put a polaroid of us on the wall, right above my head, a few days later. For the first time, I sleep through the night.