Written by Lauren Hobbs.
Illustrated by Lai Ling Berthoud
I’ve been thinking a lot about space. I used to do the same thing when I was younger – I'd dream about nebulas and constellations, and I once made a model of a satellite that my mum was so proud of that she hung it from the kitchen ceiling for months. The string it was suspended from wore thin after a while, and it crashed onto stone tile, eventually mangled by the hoover. I’m more concerned now with the space I take up on this planet, with limiting my mind to a galaxy made of the people around me. My exploration of the universe has been indefinitely postponed, at least until I can make sense of my role in this strange city that I now call home. Until I can get used to having a space of my own for the very first time.
I moved my things (small array of pinkish pots and pans, chipped blue bowl, cutlery set from the attic without any forks, fork borrowed from neighbour) out of the kitchen haunted by the ghost of a carboard sputnik and into one that my mum had never even seen. I took up a drawer, a cupboard and a shelf above the sink. I claimed a spot in the toothbrush holder in the bathroom. I put the sheets I’d been sleeping under since I was thirteen onto an unfamiliar bed. I sat and wondered madly what I was going to do with a space that was actually mine, how I could possibly fill four blank walls and a suspiciously stained carpet with enough of my energy to feel that I existed. All I had to do was forge a habitat and start letting people in. I probably just needed a nice rug.
So I mapped out the city, Saturday by Saturday, letting myself get lost and finding a way home that brought me somewhere new. I kept falling in love, over and over, with places and friends, people and things. Every new street I walked down, each fresh idea I had or any time I danced to something new. I fell in love with the corridor, first thing in the morning when it smelled most like the day I moved in. I felt less and less capable of finding a balance between what was new, and what I had come from. There wasn’t always space for both on the inside.
I stayed in my tangle of shared space, trying to scull through the mass of conflicting connections and identities that was calcifying around me. I bought more decorations for the box-room with my name on it, and stopped being very good at leaving enough space between myself and other people when the lights were off.
A boy told me last month that I was a dying star. That I couldn’t help drawing things close, like I had magnets underneath my skin, and messing them up. It was a polite way of likening me to a black hole – over-dramatic, anti-romantic and a little creepy, regardless. If I am a dying star, then at some point I will cool and wrinkle, fade from something barely visible to a winking husk. The naked eye perceives in space what may already be dead, and I just don’t think that’s true of me.
Two pink lines told me plainly that I was distinctly less alone than I realised. Microscopic life discovered on Mars. Suddenly, I am a crater filled with poison that I put there and there is a meteorite the size of Texas aimed straight at my chest. I didn’t recognise my body or the pattern of my mind, every goal I’d had a day before now seemed hazy and obsolete. The family I had foraged gathered dutifully round, shrinking their orbits as I struggled even to regulate my own temperature. Still, I marched forward, determined and matter-of-fact, driven by burning necessity like a wind-beam at my back. I have never been ruled by logic in my life, governed only ever by screaming emotion and the ravelled knot of experience writhing between my ears; but there are times when there seems only one right answer.
Just as soon as I had begun to carve a space for myself in the walls of this street, the voices of these people and the dent of my stiff mattress, I had become a vessel. I had to stop taking naps, and a friend told me that the NHS website told him that it probably looked a bit like a raspberry. There were no congratulations, only awkward, shocked smiles and sad eyes filled with pity, until there weren’t. It all moves on; you stop feeling sick after every time you eat something that isn’t toast, and you bleed until you start to think you must have empty veins. You spend all of Sunday in bed with a microwavable hot-water-bottle and a pile of articles you should definitely be reading because what was the point of all of this if you let yourself slow down – you did this so that things could be normal again. So that you could have your space back. And you have never felt more alone in your life.
I’m not sure how long we laid there together, but at some point, I got up, and I took a shower. At some point I stopped feeling like my world was quite as upside-down, even though everything somehow felt stranger. At some point, I went back to dancing. I might be struggling to define where I feel most like I belong, whether I’m caught between two places or four, or being stretched in forty directions by people with their nails in my loosening skin like a flaying that I’ve orchestrated. For now, I am just glad that I get to be young. I get to make mistakes and scrabble to fix them – or not – and I get to learn. I could learn about asteroid belts and supernovas if I wanted to. Or I could just learn which colour I prefer to paint my toenails, or that music I can move my hips to makes me happiest, or learn what my friends’ voices sound like when they break over a memory that shaped them. I can learn to stop ramming myself into spaces I don’t fit. At my own pace, I can learn to beat with one heart again.
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