During our morning snack break, the girls and boys of the eleventh and twelfth grades gather in the cafeteria. It’s not the one we eat lunch in, but a classier area meant for teachers, outfitted with a bar and coffee machine. For half an hour, after third period, the tiled linoleum, the tables and chairs, the glass doors: these are lent to the pandemonium of the older students.
It’s difficult for me to consider myself an “older student”. I’m shy of even first graders, tracing wide arcs around they and their playthings. School feels like a spherical environment, and I take a path lit by an infinite series of great circles. One of few stopping points: the cafeteria.
The tables are always occupied. The galaxy by the windows, threaded by cosmic rays and globular star clusters, all gravitationally bound, wound up tight. The string of outer space accompanying the bar, populated by the old glowing inapproachable. The mess in between, solar wind and magnetic fields, perilous and easy to trip over. I find a chair and carry it with me to the solar system farthest away.
It’s a quaint place where I am comfortable, if plenty superfluous. If they care they say nothing, fixed as they are on breaking past their orbits and poking fun at dwarf planets. There’s a pair of blazar boys, luminous and disruptive, a shiny hypercompact stellar system, a trio of components of the Orion constellation (three vertices of a triangle, Sirius, Procyon and Betelgeuse) and me, the closest thing to a perfect vacuum.
Nature abhors a vacuum, but you are not nature, you are expansive, wild and intergalactic, spanning light years and eons, you are teenage stars, so, can I ask you, please: don’t hate me.
You make everything so beautiful. Lovely job.
Emma, I don’t think I’d ever describe you as a vacuum. 🙂
Unless… do you have some sort of ultra-cool, shades-toting, secret agent-esque alter ego that goes to school for you?
(now i’m imagining you with a leather jacket and sunglasses, sitting in a corner with a book to your face, inconspicuously muttering into some sort of recording device every few minutes. it is glorious.)
Em edit: That IS glorious. Can I live inside your brain for a bit?
such wicked (as in lovely,very good etc) use of literary devices. i can’t believe the breaks between reading you are so huge. how and why do i do it?
Em edit: Renatta, I was so very glad to spot your comment this afternoon! Thank you for your kind treatment of me!