“We can compute an ephemeris for it,” I suggested.
“What is that?”
“It’s charting the path of a celestial object.”
So I collected paper, pencils, calculators, diagrams, and opened an excel spreadsheet.
We didn’t really need the paper. I thought it would make her feel more involved.
She has nice handwriting. Just in that little dash-line trail of the projected path, there is careful consideration in her penmanship. The lines are steady, well-formed, like her thoughts must be something solid. Maybe she’s one of those people who thinks in concrete images. Seeing the world through her memories like a movie broken down into its separate scenes. Some people think in words. If you are like me your mind does both. There is a movie, a soundtrack, a voice-over, and closed captions but these separate elements are not always on the same page. In fact, I daresay my planets rarely align.
I was drawn to her for her simplicity. Beauty is a surface thing. It cannot go deep.
Or so I thought.
She turned out a sharper line than I expected. She composed my image in a way I’d never seen myself before. It was like looking into a mirror from an angle I’d never had access to.
“You’re more human than you think you are,” she told me. “I don’t want to seem like a douche and tell you you’re not special, but I think you give the rest of humanity a bad rap.
We’re not all simple-minded beasts.”
“Jesus, are you charting my astrological sign?” She hunches up her shoulders and looks away in a comical exaggeration of shame. Because shame is something she doesn’t really feel. Not like I do. I want to ask her if she can tell through the charts that I’m queer, that I want her, that I see her now from this different angle, that she is gorgeous beyond the surface.
The opportunity comes and goes like a meteor across the sky. Too fast to catch in image, or words. A syllable started that goes nowhere. Dried up in my mouth. Like a dash mark, too vague. Line unconnected, never fully formed.
She slips away, gets caught up in a new orbit, some handsome boy. The math was right, hypothesis confirmed. I follow the chart. A course that was always clear. I see her path projecting out of reach, out of sight into the future.
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