I’ve always wanted to memorize more constellations, to be able to cast them out like spells in the dark, but I only know Orion, a triangle, a bear, and two dippers.

*

She told me she imagined me like King David looking up at the stars, but I didn’t know what that meant. She was the girl who had seizures for three years before she called out to the shadow in her dream and told it to leave her alone. It listened.

The only verse I can find is

1 Chronicles 21:16

David looked up and saw the angel of the LORD standing between heaven and earth, with a drawn sword in his hand extended over Jerusalem.

But that leaves out what happened before: David yelling at God for destroying Jerusalem and God relenting. And it leaves out the next line: David and everyone putting on burlap sacks and falling to the ground face down. Like emus. Or ostriches.

I think she just meant that line. Just the one out of context, disconnected from its constellation. She imagines me looking up and seeing the LORD with a sword drawn over my kingdom. Or maybe like Damocles, seeing it whenever she looked up. I didn’t stop it from falling.

*

I stood in the dark on the edge of the world and looked up. The sky looked like the underside of a glass craft table, me looking from underneath at the small plastic tub of glitter spilled all over. I wanted to reach out and touch it, place my palm flat against it, but my hands were too cold. I want to say blistering, but I’ve never had blisters from weather. Not even at -40.

I wondered what lines Mongolians drew in the sky when Chinggis was warring and raping and killing. When he was winning.

Mongolia has a National Astrologer. That’s a real job title. The astrologer decides when holidays begin and end because they’re on the lunar calendar, not the Gregorian. I wanted to walk into the little mudbrick house with the low ceilings and doorway and talk about the stars, but I couldn’t. The Mongolian family would talk about the weather, how it was cold, how the sheep were grazing. I thought how stupid they were, unable to name constellations and talk about the bodies above. And then I thought, how stupid am I?

*

“Pancakes,” Isaac said. “Batter. Pancakes. Batter.”

I looked to Brock on the bus seat.

“Why does he do that?”

But he just shrugged narrow shoulders and we watched the kid.

Brock smiled with missing baby teeth and said, “Watch this. Hey Isaac, name the constellations.”

And the kid turned his head side to side like he was in pain.

“Come on, Isaac. Name them.”

I looked around and other kids leaned in, waiting for the weird kid to entertain.

“Name them,” someone else said.

And he did. In alphabetical order.

“Andromeda, Atlia, Apus, Aquarius, Aquila…”

I turned to Brock.

“Whoa. He can name them all?”

Toothless smile and a nod.

“Camelopardalis, Cancer, Canes Venatici, Canis Major, Canis Minor, Capricornus…”

“All of them?”

He nodded.

“He has to. Once he starts, he can’t stop.”

He looked back to Isaac.

“Hey Isaac, stop.”

“No. Fornax, Gemini, Grus. . .”

“Hey Isaac.”

“No!” he yelled. “Microscopium, Monocerus, Musca, Norma. . .”

“Hey Isaac!”

Little blonde Isaac screamed “No” and the older kids in the back of the bus laughed.

The redheaded bus driver turned half around to yell “Hey, stop messing with Isaac.” Everyone ducked behind the ripped green vinyl seat coverings. They giggled with hands over their mouths.

I peeked over the chair and looked back at Isaac tottering back and forth with his hands pressed to his ears and watched his lips move. I listened close.

In a whisper, “Vela, Virgo, Vulans, Vulpecula.”

*

When I drive in the desert, I imagine the black of the road and the sand around me to be mirrored above, the stars just rocks or cacti or any rare exception in the void.

*

My mind is like a map with roads and turns and directions. But there are no directions. Who’s directing it? And where does the map end?

My mind is like a tapestry with different threads weaving together colors and thoughts and ideas never before combined, or maybe not so messily or garish as I do. I spin my own thread and weave my own patterns, but they aren’t really my own.

My mind is like a constellation.

(Mmm.)

It’s a night sky with points of clarity and huge swaths of void, of nothing, of total chaos and energy and radioactivity. My mind uses the same stars yours does, just in a different combination, like a Mongolian constellation, or Mercurian, or Martian, or mine. Or just a child looking up at night and pointing out things that might connect. My constellations are large, unwieldy, and often unfinished. They grow, adding lonely stars as they become more complex, cities of movement and story. And they are complete in all of their gaps and spaces and brightness.

But she says my mind is like a river, that it keeps going because it has to. It’s forever, unceasing, unfaltering. It just keeps going, she says, and people can get in and join if they want, but the river is going no matter what. I sit and think she’s right. For a long time, I think the girl who had the seizures is right.

*

* My constellations have points of brilliance *

They’re mostly abyss.

*

When Nietzsche writes, “for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you,” what he really means is you can see your own constellation if you look hard enough.

What he really means is that the abyss is already out there, watching.

What he really means is the abyss will find you in the form of a whip and a horse.

Nietzsche throws his body over the horse and begs the man with the whip to stop. Tears stream down his face and his corpus collosum snaps in half like a wafer.

Raskolnikov did the same. In a dream, he’s a boy, seven years old, and watches an old mare whipped and then beaten over the back with a rod. He breaks from his father’s hand and runs toward the man and yells and throws his fists with tears in his eyes.

Nietzsche said he had to stop reading Dostoevsky because he wouldn’t have anything left to write, but I’m pretty sure he read that scene, the first point in his own constellation. Friedrich reading and feeling that it would all come back to that moment, that horse, that whip, seeing the point around which his whole life would revolve, of which all other moments in his life would anchor to, and then turning the page.

*

Muriel Rukeyser said, “the universe is made up of stories, not atoms,” but I don’t think they’re exclusive.

I read that on an email signature.

*

The first storyteller lays down on the grass with an animal fur over his sinewy torso, ribs sharp against his skin, and looks up at the sky. He sees a big star with a bit of red in it and another close by with a bit of yellow. Just a little more yellow than the rest, but he sees it. No, that’s wrong. She sees it. The man is somewhere else, and it’s her looking up into the darkness. She sees the little difference in the yellow and red stars and she gives them names. They’re probably grunts or some guttural sounds we can’t imagine but she gives them names and at first they’re just for her. She holds them close and talks to them at night as they move through the sky in different directions, and she understands why. She begins to know them, and then she loves them. Later, she tells restless children unable to sleep the stories about the slightly red and slightly yellow dots, how they are brother and sister trekking across the sky to adventure, but to ultimately find peace. Or how they’re king and queen. Enemies chasing one another. You and me.

*

It was the wrong verse.

Revelation 12:1

A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars;

She saw me looking up at her standing on the moon with bare crooked toes gripping the surface hard enough to crater. I looked up at the sky and she just blinked eyelashes that split in the middle from black to blonde.

I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled.

“Is this how you see me? Looking up into the sky at you?”

She smiled and I saw the giggle at her throat but didn’t hear anything. She crouched low on the moon, careful to keep her balance, and then jumped into the sky, her crown of twelve stars lighting the way and I wondered where she got it, if it was gifted to her after she told the darkness to leave her alone, its illumination her lifelong protection from quivering on the ground.

*

Every sentence is a constellation. Every word, the  s  a   m  e.

*

I thought my constellation would be contained, a closed system, but it’s open and intricate and splays out manifold. Connections don’t have to be constricted. Me and the woman who first saw Jupiter or Mars and Venus or Saturn moving across the heavens. In my mind, though, it’s always her with her crown, lying on the grass and pointing out things in the dark, but she’s not a Cro-Magnon.

But they are connected, united, their constellations sharing a point. Mine, sharing the same. The rest of these points close in on themselves and contain a little truth inside, imagined white lines boxing it all in tight. They are the beginnings, the little flickers in the darkness.

The stars are the ones that put our minds to work telling stories. And they’re always the same stories, aren’t they? They’re change. They’re movement beyond our control. They’re fate. They’re destiny. They’re all the big words too heavy to wield alone.

We must wield them together.

I lie down with the children on the grass and stare up as the red of the sun diminishes and fades into the abyss. The first astronomer clears her throat and the girl who had seizures lies next to me as we listen to the stories of the sky.

I realize the best I can ever do is retell them differently.

*

Two women lie on blankets in thick jackets on the asphalt of my driveway while he and I change his brake pads.

“J, you need help? Or you got it?” My hands are numb from the cold and I look at the tops of the women’s heads. I don’t love them, but I want to be lying next to them looking up at whatever they’re looking at. I wonder what she’s looking at.

“I got it. Can you bring me that bottle of grease? The gray one?” and he walks off to get it while I turn a ratchet and stare at the women staring up.

He comes back and hands it to me and I finish running the bolt until it’s tight, put the wheel on, and lower the car. I stand and wash my hands and walk over to the women on the blankets and lie down between them, their puffy jackets rubbing loudly against my shoulders.

“What are you looking at?” I ask, looking up for her twelve-star crown, and one points a finger up into the emptiness and says,

“I can’t remember what that one’s called. Do you?”

And I realize I’ve yet to look at the sky for anything but her. I realize this is the end of our constellation, and the beginning of my own.

But I look up at the sky and say to the women beside me,

“I don’t,

but I’ve

always

wanted

to

memorize

constellations

so

I

could

cast

them

out

like

spells

in

the                              dark

.”