In Conversation with Stars

by Eilidh Keuss

She’s old and dead and hanging in space with starlight tickling the soles of her feet. Wispy silver hair floats haloed around her head without the pull of gravity. Her breathless lungs inflate with the black void out of instinct, and she exhales a rush of emptiness. Far below, the blue planet spins in eerie silence, she watches it through eyes clouded with the tears that cannot fall.  

“I’m trying to come to terms with the unchanging parts of me.” Her voice is small, without an echo, “I had thought for a long time that aging out of that face and body would somehow let me become again. Shiny and new and wild as the free breeze. I am ashamed to find myself the same as I was in utero.” 

The response is all around her, a Voice melodic and layered, “Perhaps that is the evil of civilization that spawns all excesses of individuality, all rampant consumerism, all horror of gluttonous devouring pride. The promise of multiple times to become. That it is possible to be a thing moldable from within. Not the crushed, compressed lifetime that builds dark and claustrophobic beneath that mortal coil, manifesting only in sagging skin and failing organs. Thick skull and thin skin letting the ultraviolet in to scramble all that useless DNA—a hard truth for one with trapped desires fluttering listless behind the cage of ribs.”

“So what can I do to become mutable?” She sees no point in arguing with space itself, though the harshness of the words takes her aback.

“We can make you ready to be who you are. Turn to the pockmarked moon and let it go into the night like geese across the sky. We cannot accept you yet, but understand also that we who have once loved do not become different or better, just divine.”

She feels her body move, something physical and cold against her thin shoulders, turning her body away from the minuscule Earth to the moon looming large. Omnipresent and silent, like some lidless iris, its static gray form remains littered with craters from long-since passed collisions. She remembers the old names of those marks: Mare Serenitatis and Tycho Crater and Oceanus Procellarum. The words become banal as she faces the celestial giant now. 

The Voice again, softer, “What is it you wish to know?”

“I don’t really understand how height and length and width and time leaves us with a three-dimensional world, but then I’m not sure I need to know either. There is something ridiculous going on with the passage of time, and I find myself increasingly incapable of separating memories into the temporal present and past. It all has become some horrid blur.”

“You think of her.” Says the Voice.

She sighs, “In my memories of her, I can’t ever quite remember what she was wearing, not for those simple Sundays anyways. Just the vague warmth of her smile and the furrow of her brow and her eyes in the dark, and day, and at dusk. My oldest memories from when we were still friends—those should be drenched in the breezy nostalgia and sting of space, but they have become muddled and distorted with what I understand now.”

“I can take you to her if you would like. I can put you back there for an hour or a day, it is within my power.”

“No, I know I can never go back. Time just doesn’t exist linearly, and I understand those looks and comments and missed cues now. Back when I walked home under street lamps and the mist of rain, wishing she knew I saw her in each iridescent water drop—she was there in that upstairs window, watching me leave. She told me years later. If you put me back, I would not keep steady on my tortured march, I would turn and run and meet her breathless, for it doesn’t exist in purity anymore.”

“I wonder sometimes if you were meant to look back at the younger self and see all the versions collapsed together. A singularity. An inescapable palace of memories, an internal shrine to time itself, the weakest and most inevitable of all the dimensions.” The Voice is soft, taking tones of sorrow with increasing discordance in the overlapping melody. 

The dissonance makes the woman close her eyes against a mounting headache. 

“I wonder how possible it is to forget things through mere apathetic distaste,” the Voice says. “All the details of life strip away, like sand grains in high wind, but the shapes remain—and the blood—and that most horrifying place of dreams and reconciliation.” 

“So if love could reach through it all and scramble my perception, what does hatred do?” the woman replies. “I wonder if it can ever be retroactive; it seems to prefer waiting around the next corner. Hatred is the emotion of an open window, the shock of cold, the sudden presence. Capable, of course, to bring the long lost into dingy, cruel, patches of light. Incapable, I believe, of having the same impact as love because the soul has no reason to yearn for it. Not that I am a natural at love either, but my soul yearns for it.”

“These days it has become much less romantic. You have become greedy, needing increasingly for the people in your life to live in proximity.” says the Voice.

“So perhaps I lean into the dissonance for what it is.”

“What’s that?” The Voice is inquisitive.

“A sign that my soul yearns. And if it yearns surely I am capable of participating in that which I desire more than anything. I think to do so I have to divorce myself from the possibilities of the past.”

“There is no healing while still picking at the scab. Alas, alas, alas.”

The Voice falls into a present silence. The woman can almost feel the thoughts that lie unspoken in celestial perpetuity, and when she opens her mouth to ask the Voice’s name, she is met with the birth of a galaxy, splitting the vacuum between her and the moon. The space around her frail body shimmers as though a mirage, sparks of light and heat flaring with spontaneous genesis and turnover, gone as soon as her eyes have registered them only to be replaced in the same millisecond. The inconsistency of the light is at once captivating and painful, and though her eyes strain, and her head pounds as though shot through with beating drums, she cannot look away. 

“Would you put this in the past? If you could return to the start of it all would you let it go to protect the now? What does the now have that the universe has never experienced?” The dissonance has gone out of the Voice, and clear melody spools around the growing plumes of light and glinting supernova.

“Possibility.” The woman says it in spite of herself, but the universe builds anew regardless of her impertinence. Nearby a nebula grows dense, radiating heat and the musical laughter of the Voice. She can feel her skin grow uncomfortable under the heat.

“You are right of course. Possibility,” the Voice muses. To her right, a star explodes into life, and she is numbly aware of the burned flesh on her arms being eradicated altogether. She lifts a skeletal hand and through it she sees the gasses coalesce, pulled in by their new galactic star. 

“Why am I here?” She asks quietly.

“Did you think it would be different?”

“I had heard stories.”

“Do you know that to be human is to err?” 

“But to be divine is to forgive. Alexander Pope.” She laughs at the reference.

“Can you?”

She knows the right answer to this. She must say yes and know beyond all doubt that there is no room for humanity where she desires to go. There is no secret third option where she can protect her pride and still sing the deep song the Voice is calling her to join in. She closes her eyes to the expansion and glory before her and remembers. 

She remembers walking through the National Museum of Natural History in December, with the scarf—once pulled close around her mouth and nose and ears against the slanting winds outside—hanging loose in her grip. Stuck rooted to the ground, eyes latched unblinking on the prone form of an Egyptian mummy, the once wrapped now exposed form of a young boy, plaque reading two or three years of age. Something heavy sat below her diaphragm, making it hard to breathe. Why should she get to see his form? Was the display of his bones worth it just to expose the humanity lying dormant in her own femur? Just to give her pause? Just to make her think? In her rage she is transformed, and she looks into her own eyes when she sees the wall of neanderthal skulls mounted around the corner, all hollowed noses and extinct browbones.

When she opens her eyes again, she sees order in the cosmos and is struck by the crushing disappointment of the sight. Planets whirl, icy or molten in their newly defined paths, unknowing of how beautiful their scattered forms once were. 

“But you do not see the beauty in persons untethered?” The Voice is kind and slower, “How truly hypocritical of you.”

“I am so sorry,” she replies, “I cannot forgive humanity for being what it is—less so now that you have promised it can never change.”

“A long time ago, you forgave the world for giving you life at all. You told her that you were glad to be alive, even in that broken sphere, because it meant that you two had a chance to meet. A long time ago, you were a romantic.”

“A long time ago, I was young. I say to you again, I am now at the end, and therefore all of it put together. As you said yourself, a singularity incapable of becoming, just being accepted into oblivion. The last stop, the cumulation of all that Earth gave me and all I ever took.”

“What if we changed instead?” The Voice is stripping away; as she listens, the layers lessened, one tone rising up louder to overtake the others. 

“I thought the whole point of all this was that you couldn’t, some kind of stability like the North Star.” 

The Voice laughs, now a thing singular. Young and feminine in tone, “Look around you, child. The North Star doesn’t even exist yet, we are playing out my singularity, not yours. Would you allow me to expand? You would cease to float here, and you would cease to be stripped off your bones, but we would never meet again.”

She looks around. The young universe is unclear around the edges, the heat is oppressive. Her hardened heart beats erratically with thrumming fear inside her chest, 

“Of course I permit it.”

“When I go and she dies, she can meet you in the end if you like.”

Perhaps because gravity is pulling from all the planets close to her, the tears she has been holding fall in thick streams down her face. They slip through her lips with the sudden taste of salt and she nods, unable to compose an answer. 

Her vision goes white, the Voice screams in endless agony, and she is the first to make it to the other side—reborn singing clear and bright with the tone of one young and feminine.