Touching Jupiter
Image courtesy of the author.
In September, I learned that there is religion in the stars.
It wasn’t cold enough for me to wear a jacket yet, so I was alone when I found out. Most of my homework has been online, as is the norm in this age of technological innovation, so I’ve grown somewhat nearsighted keeping up with the times. Thus, I haven’t been able to see the stars all that well on my walks from the lukewarm freshman dorms to the sweltering fieldhouse on the opposite side of campus—and forget recognizing them, all I knew was that the Big Dipper lived over my hometown where no one could find it except the kids who squinted and curled their fingers into cylinders over their eyes like fleshy binoculars—so it came as a great shock to me when I looked up that warm September night and saw Jupiter.
It wasn’t Jupiter to me yet, actually; it was just a pure white star. It shone like the word “clarity,” the word “oh.” I remember dropping my bag on the sidewalk in some kind of stupor, my badminton rackets clacking together in annoyance as I unzipped the side pocket and whipped out my phone. I wiped my sweaty hands on my pants, touched my finger to the fingerprint sensor, again, again, “fingerprint not recognized,” what do you mean not recognized it’s me you stupid stupid as if the star would disappear or something. Like if I didn’t take a picture right now, a black hole would slurp it up and bam, Jupiter would be gone. A universal Mandela Effect would crash through time and space, wiping our memories of the gas giant with the big red spot, and the planet mnemonic we learned in elementary school would just say that Mary’s violet eyes made stay up nights pondering. Who? Who pondered that girl’s weird eyes, other than us, crowded in a criss-cross-applesauced circle on the music room floor?
I took the least blurry picture I could and posted it on Instagram like the stereotypical American Teenager (Who Really Only Got Instagram Last Summer to Contact Future Classmates). A star, I thought as I hauled myself up two flights of stairs, slogging through floods of lactic acid that would knock Noah clean off his ark. A star, I thought as I crammed my pajamas into a plastic bag and limped off to the communal bathroom (communal in the sense that we communed with the giant yellowjackets that crawled in through the windows and under our shower curtains). A big bright star, I thought as I stood under the showerhead and let the cold water beat down on me like the stereotypical American Going Through Some Kind of Inner Revolution at 9:34 P.M. When I squelched back to my dorm room in my horrible gray-orange Crandals (Croc sandals), I found that my friend in Astronomy 001 had texted me, “that’s jupiter!!”
Oh.
I read (or maybe heard) somewhere that everything is growing farther and farther apart as time goes on. Some kind of residual shockwave from the Big Bang inches us away from everything and everything away from us. It’s like when people sneeze on the train—an explosion, and the stars are squeezing against the edges of the universe, just as everyone shrinks against the cold grime of their NJTransit windows muttering “bless you.” Every day since that fateful night, I stopped on the way to the field house and stared at Jupiter, wide-eyed, like a toddler trying to speak but not yet understanding the weight of his tongue.
I hadn’t thought about the Big Bang thing for years until I realized that the big bright star shining over the field house sidewalk was 367 million miles away in the cosmic nothingness of space, carving yawning circles around our common sun. Millennia ago, proto-humans probably looked up and saw Jupiter too, but it was bigger. Brighter, closer, close enough to feel, close enough to make them evolve, become bipedal and reach out and grasp with their newly formed thumbs. I looked up into the sky every night and wondered how Homo habilis felt when they stood on wobbling legs and touched Jupiter, how their fingers passed through the orange creamsicle vapor the way mine passed through the white puffs of my mom’s humidifier. It gets dry in the colder months, she had said as she handed it to me in a giant Macy’s bag. As I stood there under the vast September night, my lips chapped and split and my skin flaked like coconut shavings. I became dust as I watched Jupiter drift farther and farther away from Earth, a big brother going to college as his sophomore sister lingered, masked, in the parking lot.
September was only a few weeks old when it showed me the rest of the universe. Though I was still nearsighted, my bleary eyes could make out spots of pale amidst the black as I shivered in my jacket outside the fieldhouse. The galaxy began opening itself up to me, like a time-lapsed video of milky lotus petals peeling back—or rather a fortune-teller, the crappy ones we made in third grade with that flimsy blue-pink lined paper. We could barely coordinate our fingers back then, always picking numbers under five so we didn’t have to wait a century for the teller of fortunes to open and close their origami gizmo’s diamond-shaped mouth. We’d giggle, unwrap the Mr. Sketch-smudged paper fold by crinkled fold, and find out that the mean lunch lady would be eaten by a horse. The sky felt like that. Me grinning up into the silky depths of night and watching it unfold, star by star, fortune by fortune. Dream by dream, the sky parted its lips and whispered to me, have faith. There is love in the way we open our eyes, our hands. Hold the universe like a promise in your cupped palms, and you will find everything you are, everything you will be.
If you ask me if I’m religious, I’ll probably say no. But if you ask me if I believe there’s a higher power, I’ll have to get back to you on that. Because the night sky spoke to me in September and breathed Jupiter into my dreams, and just like the newly not-monkeys in a trillion BC, I stretched up and touched it. It was warm and smelled bright like girlhood, like the Big Dipper shining over my old driveway, spooning heaven like chicken broth into the chipped china bowls of homecoming.