In a Conversation I Often Only Remember My HalfâââSaturn Returns
The projector image of Saturn looks exactly like one of the toys I used a lot on the playground in my after school program, a kind of squishy ball with a frisbee-like ring on the outer edge you were supposed to balance on. I tried replicating this on a basketball with my friends by promptly falling onto my face splitting my lip and cracking my tooth. There was a lady observing the replacement of the other half of my tooth later in the dentistâs chair and she asked if I looked in the mirror and wanted to cry. I wanted to punched her.
Andrewâs romance timeline made me realized my timeline would be a dot. I do remember picking flowers for my first grade teacher, Ms. Tamez. Ms. Tamez was nearsighted but never wore glasses. She would squint into the tiny diamond between her index fingers and thumbs smashed together, telling us that this was her trick for seeing without glasses. I would repeat the motion, and believe her that compressing the world into a smaller space would allow the details to suddenly make themselves clear, the way textbooks illustrate the different states of matter as different numbers of dots in a box, compressing from gas to liquid to solid. Lately I have been trying to recall my state of mind as it was the same time a year ago, as if by doing so I can anticipate my next emotional state with yearly seasonal patterns. When the weather changes, I think about temperature as defined by the excitability and movement of particles. I sometimes wonder about my state of matter, about myself as a particle, about myself as particles, about where the particles come from, or if the size of the box just changes.
I came prepared to see the show, alone, for its concept. We see a lot of shows on premise, but the magnetism in this was almost the same thing that makes you pick up a one word book. I ended up not seeing the show alone. Sitting next to Alison in the audience, I thought about my friend Alexander, who usually sat next to me for concerts, performances. Alexander didnât really get along with Alison. I thought about the other reasons why he probably wasnât there and why he hadnât been for a while. I thought about Kaitlyn asking âwhat is a job anywayâ after Alison rationalized her corporate job as we were trying to talk small, and the time I answered the phone for Michelle when she needed someone and I didnât want to be that someone. Alexander fighting his demons and needing someone and not calling anyone, Alexander in space, going away to another planet called Treatment, each time coming back into to earth spinning at a different pace of time, slower, faster or both. In thinking about who we create meaning with being often the ones that remain in our lives, it feeling very wrong that Alexander was not there when he was there in several constructions of meaning Iâve made before. I looked at the ground recalling all the marbles and broken pieces of glass Alexander would pick up on walks with me when Tif wrote âWhy donât we look down?â (?) and felt a sadness about asking who might remain in my life by 29 and who might not.
John, who sat on my right, had wanted it to be more cohesive. I asked him if he had wanted more of a thesis. I had come prepared to see the show, alone, for its concept. Thereâs an animatronic apothecary on the first floor of the Museum of Surgical Science, which is how I pictured Kurtâs descriptions of each performer in a hypothetical, obvious planetarium. I like the Museum of Surgical Science because there are no electronic or interactive displays, only glass cases of prosthetics, needles, bottles of cocaine, and an ophthalmological display that looks like a dentistâs office with jars of glass eyeballs.
There was a sort of hand motion Lily did of touching her collarbone that I noticed particularly after Tif talked about waking up with anxiety and touching your bare chest and breathing. I suddenly realized that I had developed that gesture myself while standing in church and watching fellow worshipers stretching their hands out, together, surrounded by rows and rows of outstretched hands. I would start to stretch out my hand to have it land on my chestâââevoking an elementary school muscle memory of pledging allegiance âto to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.â It felt like an appropriate substitution. âWho here doesnât miss something?â At this point in the show without knowing why the question did not seem to be about my emotional state of being, but about where I wanted to be in time. But I kept my hand half raised.
