Through All My Lives
Natasha Oslinger
“...Ten, open your eyes, Natasha, what did you see?” An elaborate tapestry draped over the small circular table separates the Angel Reader and me.
“Where did I go? How long was a gone for?” I jolted my head up and down, left and right. I am back in a familiar room, encompassed with crystals and drawings of the human body glowing from their solar plexus. There is a map of the constellations directly above me, the dank must of the room is covered unsuccessfully by a cheap lavender perfume. A skylight dimly lights the room, but causes creeping shadows to propel sharply across every surface.
“You didn’t go anywhere, Darling. You were here with me, eyes closed, for five minutes. Do you remember where you are? Do you need a bottle of water?”
I remember where I am. The damp and wrinkled flyer for “past life regression therapy” is tearing in my clenched fist. The woman across from me extends her heavily jeweled and slightly shaking arm to hand me a small bottle of water, I do not take the water. I can hear a record projecting pan flute music softly skip in the background. The entire wall directly across from me is a mirror, I notice it reflecting a mirror on the opposite wall, I smile.
* * *
I do as the angel reader instructs and close my eyes, she begins to count, “10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2…”
I am floating through space––1. I tempt the small green lever on the side of my helmet with a gentle tug, a less than significant pressure flips it laterally. You would imagine it would produce a noise at least equivalent to a life ending, you imagine it would produce any noise at all, but everyone knows that there is no sound in space. I breathe in, but an insufficient amount of oxygen remains in my suit, inhaling does nothing. I find comfort in the expansion of my chest, though, and I know this will be the last time I feel such a comfort. My helmet twists off far too easily, then I toss it to my side expecting something other that for it to remain stationary, fixed where I let go. The entire transition from ship to free float took only a number of moments, and each rotation only a second, but it felt far longer. As I reached for the yellow and red striped button protruding from the wall, my movements felt almost comically slow, as if I was mocking my own death in an ironic sort of acceptance. The tips of the 6 curved metal triangles retract routinely into the now empty edges of hatch, exposing the vacancy existing outside. I thought the change in pressure would suck me into the void instantly, like a bug on the last spin of the drain before it succumbs and is consumed by the dark pipe, but a thin layer of oxygen creates a protective seal. I am down to skin, bone, and tremors, I can already feel the cold creeping across the soft parts of my skin. I’ve never been one for last words, but I’ve also never been one to ignore an opportunity for a flair of dramatics.
“Mirror in the mirror,” I exhale into the emptiness ahead of me. Why did I say this? It felt like the right thing to say but still I search the corridors of my mind to find the meaning behind this phrase, the cold is getting to me. My arms are shaking, I can feel the muscles in my legs begin to move in strange ways, as though they are trying to escape my skin and free themselves from what is about to happen. God, my head hurts, this isn’t peaceful. This is supposed to be peaceful. I stumble backwards several paces, disoriented, and begin shaking my head left, right, up, down, left, right, as if a non corporeal being is asking me yes or no questions. I’m on the floor, holding onto the wall to keep the lack of gravity from mixing me around the room, I begin pulling out my hair. This isn’t peaceful, God, it is so cold. Mother must have forgotten to turn on the furnace before I got home from school. She knows I get home at 3:15 every day, silly Mother! I can see her worn dress, I can see her long thin fingernails that she used to dig the splinters out from my fingers. I look down at my own hands, oh my, I am so young again! Look at my hands!
“You mustn't sit on the floor, Little Fox,” Mother’s voice echoes through the hatch, I haven’t heard her voice in years, I know she isn’t here, but I know she is here. I look up and she is standing with her heels hanging out the door, a smile creeps across my face and my forehead contracts as if my intertwining eyelashes would hold back a sudden episode of tears. I look outside at the million little lights and remember her telling me how she loves each of my two million freckles. She reaches her arm out and we lock fingers, she pulls me up. Just as my unoccupied hand leaves the ground and all the force of her weight is tethering me up, she lets go. She lets go of my hand, she lets go of the wall, she falls out the door and slowly melts into the darkness of space. I decide to join her. As I approach the door, I can feel the vacuum seal beginning to dismantle. I touch the bolted metal of the door, let's not make this last any longer. One foot is out the door, I take a step into darkness.
I don’t know what I expected would happen, I thought I might begin to fall, but there is nowhere to fall in space. As I take a graceful step off the platform of the hatch, I somersault away from the ship. An object in motion remains in motion. With every rotation I make I expect to feel blood rush to my head, but I must remember, there is nowhere to fall in space. I make it eight rotations, but my body makes it 15.
* * *
Rotation One: let’s see what kills me first. I am drifting through space, what do you think will kill me first? Maybe it will be the bugs. The second I’m out of the airlock, what feels like millions of tiny bugs begin crawling just under the first layer of my skin. Little tiny bubbles begin forming like a faucet that's been put on high, just like Mother filling the bath. The metal oval protruding from the left corner of our moldy bathroom indents the ground slightly as it fills. The plastic tiles that cover the floor are a disgusting pink color, and the walls a withered white, peeling from the many years of steam. Clear bubbles accumulate directly under the stream of hot water, I can smell the shampoo, it smells like lemons from my grandmother’s tree. I rock back and forth creating miniature tsunamis that beg to escape the lipped edge of the tub. All those little tiny bubbles, they must have traveled a long way to find themselves collecting under my skin. I don’t think it will be the bugs that kill me, though, it’s got to be the cold. I never could have believed that cold could feel this warm before, it wraps me up like I’m hiding under the sheets of a freshly made linen bed. I’m in my bedroom, my best friend Paolo is sleeping next to me. Directly above the bed centered to the left of my under-organized room is a skylight. I never take my eyes off of the stars above me, my small unkempt fingers are intertwined through Paolo’s hair. How ironic, the amount of time I spent dreaming about being in the stars. I would imagine myself sitting atop a tiny planet, I would be an explorer of the galaxy, with Paolo sitting atop his own tiny planet directly adjacent. This dream often faded into a nightmare, thought, because cruel relativity would cause Paolo to age far quicker than I, and all I could do was watch him die as I remained. I would pull him closer, under those sheets we were warm and safe. I try to pull up sheets around me now but my fingers are too stiff from the cold.
My arms float up past my head–no–it won’t be the cold that kills me, that is far too simple. It will be the radiation, mother always told me not to stand in front of the microwave or the radiation will fry my brain. Maybe it will be the space dust traveling thousands of kilometers an hour, or one of the micro black holes I read about in Astronomy 205. By the time my chattering mind has exhausted all possible death receipts, I am once again vertical. I have made it one rotation, I am about two feet away from the hatch.
Rotation Two: smells. When you are under water, your brain begins working at full speed to protect you. Although you might be swimming carelessly, floating even, your brain uses every ounce of its energy to make sure you don’t die (currently, my brain is not pleased with me.) All those muscles that are involved with stopping you from inhaling, they are all working to protect you. Many people have claimed that there is no scent in space, but now, I know they are wrong. The muscles trying to protect me from inhaling are currently working in overdrive, but, they are doing so to no avail. There is no air for me to accept, which means no opportunity for scent, so one would think. They are wrong. A certain smell is slowly seeping into my skin, penetrating my olfactory system. This scent would be impossible to recreate, despite any material provided, this smell is a secret between myself and the universe. My head is now facing the ship, I have made another rotation. I feel as though I am a baton being gracefully catapulted into the air, or a stick that's been dropped off the side of a cobblestone bridge, bobbing along the river beneath only to disappear, then after a long moment, make a final appearance on the bridge’s other side. Only I know the smell of the universe.
Rotation Three: everyone knows that there is no sound in space. What do I hear? I attempt to focus on one particular noise but they are all jumbled together. There's a discernible pounding, it sounds as if the planets are hollow prisons housing inmates desperately trying to escape. The rhythmic thump courses throughout my entire body, the inmate’s fists are not inside the planets at all, but rather my own chest. I dissect the jumble of sound and pull out another distinct noise, it's the polar bears saying goodnight. Every night I would lie in bed under that skylight, and Mother would sit next to me until I fell asleep. A certain sound accompanies falling asleep, if you think about it you know the sound. It’s a kind of high pitched frequency, like a dog whistle. Every night I would lay in bed, and whenever I heard that noise, Mother would reassure me that that it was just the sound of the polar bears saying goodnight. I am about to enter the fourth rotation, my eyes begin to close, the polar bears must know I am falling asleep.
Rotation Four: licking batteries. It’s getting harder and harder to think, but, I feel the need to complete my mental catalog of space’s features, so, I move onto taste. A sort of metallic lip gloss covers my lips, but it’s less of a taste than it is a feeling. It’s the sweet sweet flavor of electricity, like I’ve been licking batteries or kissing lightning, an electric love. I was merely a child when I discovered the less than flavorful experience of a positively charged mouth. Triple A, C, and D batteries were my personal favorite, they produced a 1.5 voltage that I found tasted of a lemon tart. 9v and coin cells have a higher voltage, they had a flavor that closer resembled the feeling of burnt taste buds slowly regaining feeling. Finally, there were silver flat packs, which tasted like hospital lollipops (hospital lollipops were generally the entree that followed batteries.) There will be no meal following my current taste, though, outer space is one course dining.
Rotation Five: reach out and touch. The most predominant sense I experience while drifting is a very peculiar feeling on my skin. It’s not the bugs accumulating in my veins, no no, it is something much more personal. Imagine an oubliette. You are walking through a vastly open field spotted with occasional patches of grass, the sky is a dusty gray. Like an open wound, the oubliette sits as an out of place gaping hole in the ground. Lining its walls are thousands upon thousands of hands, like an inverted millipede. You step into the oubliette and begin to fall, like Alice down the rabbit hole, expecting the harsh toll of gravity to pull you downwards. But you don’t fall, you are gently carried downwards by the hands. On second thought, maybe they are carrying you upwards, there is no up or down in space. As I’m drifting it feels as though
thousands of hands are gently spinning me. They touch me lovingly, like a mother's touch.
Rotation Six: near death experience. I’m not sure if this could be considered a near death experience when taking into account the fact that I am actually about to die, so, let’s refer to it as a death experience. I have heard many times that one's life will flash before their eyes as they face death, but that is vastly oversimplifying it. As a child I often played “geologist” in the hollow rocky crevices of my backyard. One day I turned up a particularly excellent find, an extremely circular white rock covered in curved scars, and it found a new home at the bottom of my swimming pool. I used to love to look up at the surface water from the bottom of the swimming pool, but I found I could never stay down long enough to get a good look at the world above me. My rock was an anchor that pinned me to the sloped and rust stained bottom of the pool, I would balance it on my chest and let my arms and legs sway. Then, looking through my chlorine colored glasses and squinting at the curling light above me, I witnessed a performance. It felt as if the water was performing a dance just for me. I am on rotation six, and my life does not flash before my eyes. It does, however, perform a dance, just for me, on the inside of my eyelids.
Rotation Seven: looking and seeing and knowing and being. There is only one sense left, and I must say, I have been procrastinating noticing it. I’ve catalogued awareness, smell, sound, taste, touch, and what I can nearly see, but there is one sense that I have excluded until this very moment. I open my slightly frozen over eyes to inspect my surroundings, one full rotations worth, a full 360 of space. I start with my head parallel to the bottom of the rickety ship across from me. It sits abrasively out of place against the seemingly far away backdrop of deep space. The bottom of the ship consists of 10 cylindrical propellers attached to a small rectangular box connected to the hull. The ship’s edges are a dull metal crawling with overlapping channels and handles. It seems to be some sort hybrid between a sleek inferno and a grotesque vessel, I found it inherently unnatural, but discovered comfort in the manmade connection it provided to my home planet. My rotation continued at a steady pace and my line of vision passed the ship for the last time, now I was facing the universe head on, bare and vulnerable. It felt strange knowing that this was the same universe I would whisper love songs to at night, the same universe that I would burst through the green double doors of my house screaming profanities at. Despite having my eyes open at an acute angle, the star in front of me was blinding, and I could feel a slight warmth on my cracking blistered cheeks every time I faced it. It didn’t look the way it does on greeting cards, five points and soft yellow, it was far less welcoming. How something so massive could remain fixed in place baffled me, it looked as though it would begin a sudden descent into the darkness surrounding it at any moment. And it did, in a sense, because as my head makes its transit past the star, it seems to launch itself out of my vision, only to live forevermore in my peripherals. Now there is just darkness, darkness like burned velvet scattered with the occasional diamond. Just as my head returns to the same position it started in, I let my eyelids join in the middle once again, and the thin strip of black exposed to me just before my final rotation would forever remain the last thing I saw out of this set of eyes.
Rotation Eight: the final rotation excluding the seven that I was unconscious for. Imagine you are in a box made of mirrors, what do you see? The top mirror reflects the bottom which reflects the top which reflects the bottom, the sides reflect similarly. Each mirror reflects its reflection an infinite number of times, and there you are, in the center, infinate on all sides of yourself. Billions of arms, billions of legs, billions of hearts. Some say they feel a glowing warmth wash over them, starting in their fingers and ending on the tip of their nose. I did not feel a warmth, but it was far too cold to care. I felt Paolo pulling the sheets over our heads, I felt my mother tucking me in. Some say they taste a syrupy sweet on the back of their tongue, I did not taste honey, I tasted the bitter lemons from my grandmother’s tree, electric like batteries. Some say they see a bright white tunnel, others say they see darkness, I did not see light nor dark. Growing from the left hand corner of my left eye, following the curvature of my eyelids, I saw the mirror in the mirror.
Natasha Oslinger
“...Ten, open your eyes, Natasha, what did you see?” An elaborate tapestry draped over the small circular table separates the Angel Reader and me.
“Where did I go? How long was a gone for?” I jolted my head up and down, left and right. I am back in a familiar room, encompassed with crystals and drawings of the human body glowing from their solar plexus. There is a map of the constellations directly above me, the dank must of the room is covered unsuccessfully by a cheap lavender perfume. A skylight dimly lights the room, but causes creeping shadows to propel sharply across every surface.
“You didn’t go anywhere, Darling. You were here with me, eyes closed, for five minutes. Do you remember where you are? Do you need a bottle of water?”
I remember where I am. The damp and wrinkled flyer for “past life regression therapy” is tearing in my clenched fist. The woman across from me extends her heavily jeweled and slightly shaking arm to hand me a small bottle of water, I do not take the water. I can hear a record projecting pan flute music softly skip in the background. The entire wall directly across from me is a mirror, I notice it reflecting a mirror on the opposite wall, I smile.
* * *
I do as the angel reader instructs and close my eyes, she begins to count, “10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2…”
I am floating through space––1. I tempt the small green lever on the side of my helmet with a gentle tug, a less than significant pressure flips it laterally. You would imagine it would produce a noise at least equivalent to a life ending, you imagine it would produce any noise at all, but everyone knows that there is no sound in space. I breathe in, but an insufficient amount of oxygen remains in my suit, inhaling does nothing. I find comfort in the expansion of my chest, though, and I know this will be the last time I feel such a comfort. My helmet twists off far too easily, then I toss it to my side expecting something other that for it to remain stationary, fixed where I let go. The entire transition from ship to free float took only a number of moments, and each rotation only a second, but it felt far longer. As I reached for the yellow and red striped button protruding from the wall, my movements felt almost comically slow, as if I was mocking my own death in an ironic sort of acceptance. The tips of the 6 curved metal triangles retract routinely into the now empty edges of hatch, exposing the vacancy existing outside. I thought the change in pressure would suck me into the void instantly, like a bug on the last spin of the drain before it succumbs and is consumed by the dark pipe, but a thin layer of oxygen creates a protective seal. I am down to skin, bone, and tremors, I can already feel the cold creeping across the soft parts of my skin. I’ve never been one for last words, but I’ve also never been one to ignore an opportunity for a flair of dramatics.
“Mirror in the mirror,” I exhale into the emptiness ahead of me. Why did I say this? It felt like the right thing to say but still I search the corridors of my mind to find the meaning behind this phrase, the cold is getting to me. My arms are shaking, I can feel the muscles in my legs begin to move in strange ways, as though they are trying to escape my skin and free themselves from what is about to happen. God, my head hurts, this isn’t peaceful. This is supposed to be peaceful. I stumble backwards several paces, disoriented, and begin shaking my head left, right, up, down, left, right, as if a non corporeal being is asking me yes or no questions. I’m on the floor, holding onto the wall to keep the lack of gravity from mixing me around the room, I begin pulling out my hair. This isn’t peaceful, God, it is so cold. Mother must have forgotten to turn on the furnace before I got home from school. She knows I get home at 3:15 every day, silly Mother! I can see her worn dress, I can see her long thin fingernails that she used to dig the splinters out from my fingers. I look down at my own hands, oh my, I am so young again! Look at my hands!
“You mustn't sit on the floor, Little Fox,” Mother’s voice echoes through the hatch, I haven’t heard her voice in years, I know she isn’t here, but I know she is here. I look up and she is standing with her heels hanging out the door, a smile creeps across my face and my forehead contracts as if my intertwining eyelashes would hold back a sudden episode of tears. I look outside at the million little lights and remember her telling me how she loves each of my two million freckles. She reaches her arm out and we lock fingers, she pulls me up. Just as my unoccupied hand leaves the ground and all the force of her weight is tethering me up, she lets go. She lets go of my hand, she lets go of the wall, she falls out the door and slowly melts into the darkness of space. I decide to join her. As I approach the door, I can feel the vacuum seal beginning to dismantle. I touch the bolted metal of the door, let's not make this last any longer. One foot is out the door, I take a step into darkness.
I don’t know what I expected would happen, I thought I might begin to fall, but there is nowhere to fall in space. As I take a graceful step off the platform of the hatch, I somersault away from the ship. An object in motion remains in motion. With every rotation I make I expect to feel blood rush to my head, but I must remember, there is nowhere to fall in space. I make it eight rotations, but my body makes it 15.
* * *
Rotation One: let’s see what kills me first. I am drifting through space, what do you think will kill me first? Maybe it will be the bugs. The second I’m out of the airlock, what feels like millions of tiny bugs begin crawling just under the first layer of my skin. Little tiny bubbles begin forming like a faucet that's been put on high, just like Mother filling the bath. The metal oval protruding from the left corner of our moldy bathroom indents the ground slightly as it fills. The plastic tiles that cover the floor are a disgusting pink color, and the walls a withered white, peeling from the many years of steam. Clear bubbles accumulate directly under the stream of hot water, I can smell the shampoo, it smells like lemons from my grandmother’s tree. I rock back and forth creating miniature tsunamis that beg to escape the lipped edge of the tub. All those little tiny bubbles, they must have traveled a long way to find themselves collecting under my skin. I don’t think it will be the bugs that kill me, though, it’s got to be the cold. I never could have believed that cold could feel this warm before, it wraps me up like I’m hiding under the sheets of a freshly made linen bed. I’m in my bedroom, my best friend Paolo is sleeping next to me. Directly above the bed centered to the left of my under-organized room is a skylight. I never take my eyes off of the stars above me, my small unkempt fingers are intertwined through Paolo’s hair. How ironic, the amount of time I spent dreaming about being in the stars. I would imagine myself sitting atop a tiny planet, I would be an explorer of the galaxy, with Paolo sitting atop his own tiny planet directly adjacent. This dream often faded into a nightmare, thought, because cruel relativity would cause Paolo to age far quicker than I, and all I could do was watch him die as I remained. I would pull him closer, under those sheets we were warm and safe. I try to pull up sheets around me now but my fingers are too stiff from the cold.
My arms float up past my head–no–it won’t be the cold that kills me, that is far too simple. It will be the radiation, mother always told me not to stand in front of the microwave or the radiation will fry my brain. Maybe it will be the space dust traveling thousands of kilometers an hour, or one of the micro black holes I read about in Astronomy 205. By the time my chattering mind has exhausted all possible death receipts, I am once again vertical. I have made it one rotation, I am about two feet away from the hatch.
Rotation Two: smells. When you are under water, your brain begins working at full speed to protect you. Although you might be swimming carelessly, floating even, your brain uses every ounce of its energy to make sure you don’t die (currently, my brain is not pleased with me.) All those muscles that are involved with stopping you from inhaling, they are all working to protect you. Many people have claimed that there is no scent in space, but now, I know they are wrong. The muscles trying to protect me from inhaling are currently working in overdrive, but, they are doing so to no avail. There is no air for me to accept, which means no opportunity for scent, so one would think. They are wrong. A certain smell is slowly seeping into my skin, penetrating my olfactory system. This scent would be impossible to recreate, despite any material provided, this smell is a secret between myself and the universe. My head is now facing the ship, I have made another rotation. I feel as though I am a baton being gracefully catapulted into the air, or a stick that's been dropped off the side of a cobblestone bridge, bobbing along the river beneath only to disappear, then after a long moment, make a final appearance on the bridge’s other side. Only I know the smell of the universe.
Rotation Three: everyone knows that there is no sound in space. What do I hear? I attempt to focus on one particular noise but they are all jumbled together. There's a discernible pounding, it sounds as if the planets are hollow prisons housing inmates desperately trying to escape. The rhythmic thump courses throughout my entire body, the inmate’s fists are not inside the planets at all, but rather my own chest. I dissect the jumble of sound and pull out another distinct noise, it's the polar bears saying goodnight. Every night I would lie in bed under that skylight, and Mother would sit next to me until I fell asleep. A certain sound accompanies falling asleep, if you think about it you know the sound. It’s a kind of high pitched frequency, like a dog whistle. Every night I would lay in bed, and whenever I heard that noise, Mother would reassure me that that it was just the sound of the polar bears saying goodnight. I am about to enter the fourth rotation, my eyes begin to close, the polar bears must know I am falling asleep.
Rotation Four: licking batteries. It’s getting harder and harder to think, but, I feel the need to complete my mental catalog of space’s features, so, I move onto taste. A sort of metallic lip gloss covers my lips, but it’s less of a taste than it is a feeling. It’s the sweet sweet flavor of electricity, like I’ve been licking batteries or kissing lightning, an electric love. I was merely a child when I discovered the less than flavorful experience of a positively charged mouth. Triple A, C, and D batteries were my personal favorite, they produced a 1.5 voltage that I found tasted of a lemon tart. 9v and coin cells have a higher voltage, they had a flavor that closer resembled the feeling of burnt taste buds slowly regaining feeling. Finally, there were silver flat packs, which tasted like hospital lollipops (hospital lollipops were generally the entree that followed batteries.) There will be no meal following my current taste, though, outer space is one course dining.
Rotation Five: reach out and touch. The most predominant sense I experience while drifting is a very peculiar feeling on my skin. It’s not the bugs accumulating in my veins, no no, it is something much more personal. Imagine an oubliette. You are walking through a vastly open field spotted with occasional patches of grass, the sky is a dusty gray. Like an open wound, the oubliette sits as an out of place gaping hole in the ground. Lining its walls are thousands upon thousands of hands, like an inverted millipede. You step into the oubliette and begin to fall, like Alice down the rabbit hole, expecting the harsh toll of gravity to pull you downwards. But you don’t fall, you are gently carried downwards by the hands. On second thought, maybe they are carrying you upwards, there is no up or down in space. As I’m drifting it feels as though
thousands of hands are gently spinning me. They touch me lovingly, like a mother's touch.
Rotation Six: near death experience. I’m not sure if this could be considered a near death experience when taking into account the fact that I am actually about to die, so, let’s refer to it as a death experience. I have heard many times that one's life will flash before their eyes as they face death, but that is vastly oversimplifying it. As a child I often played “geologist” in the hollow rocky crevices of my backyard. One day I turned up a particularly excellent find, an extremely circular white rock covered in curved scars, and it found a new home at the bottom of my swimming pool. I used to love to look up at the surface water from the bottom of the swimming pool, but I found I could never stay down long enough to get a good look at the world above me. My rock was an anchor that pinned me to the sloped and rust stained bottom of the pool, I would balance it on my chest and let my arms and legs sway. Then, looking through my chlorine colored glasses and squinting at the curling light above me, I witnessed a performance. It felt as if the water was performing a dance just for me. I am on rotation six, and my life does not flash before my eyes. It does, however, perform a dance, just for me, on the inside of my eyelids.
Rotation Seven: looking and seeing and knowing and being. There is only one sense left, and I must say, I have been procrastinating noticing it. I’ve catalogued awareness, smell, sound, taste, touch, and what I can nearly see, but there is one sense that I have excluded until this very moment. I open my slightly frozen over eyes to inspect my surroundings, one full rotations worth, a full 360 of space. I start with my head parallel to the bottom of the rickety ship across from me. It sits abrasively out of place against the seemingly far away backdrop of deep space. The bottom of the ship consists of 10 cylindrical propellers attached to a small rectangular box connected to the hull. The ship’s edges are a dull metal crawling with overlapping channels and handles. It seems to be some sort hybrid between a sleek inferno and a grotesque vessel, I found it inherently unnatural, but discovered comfort in the manmade connection it provided to my home planet. My rotation continued at a steady pace and my line of vision passed the ship for the last time, now I was facing the universe head on, bare and vulnerable. It felt strange knowing that this was the same universe I would whisper love songs to at night, the same universe that I would burst through the green double doors of my house screaming profanities at. Despite having my eyes open at an acute angle, the star in front of me was blinding, and I could feel a slight warmth on my cracking blistered cheeks every time I faced it. It didn’t look the way it does on greeting cards, five points and soft yellow, it was far less welcoming. How something so massive could remain fixed in place baffled me, it looked as though it would begin a sudden descent into the darkness surrounding it at any moment. And it did, in a sense, because as my head makes its transit past the star, it seems to launch itself out of my vision, only to live forevermore in my peripherals. Now there is just darkness, darkness like burned velvet scattered with the occasional diamond. Just as my head returns to the same position it started in, I let my eyelids join in the middle once again, and the thin strip of black exposed to me just before my final rotation would forever remain the last thing I saw out of this set of eyes.
Rotation Eight: the final rotation excluding the seven that I was unconscious for. Imagine you are in a box made of mirrors, what do you see? The top mirror reflects the bottom which reflects the top which reflects the bottom, the sides reflect similarly. Each mirror reflects its reflection an infinite number of times, and there you are, in the center, infinate on all sides of yourself. Billions of arms, billions of legs, billions of hearts. Some say they feel a glowing warmth wash over them, starting in their fingers and ending on the tip of their nose. I did not feel a warmth, but it was far too cold to care. I felt Paolo pulling the sheets over our heads, I felt my mother tucking me in. Some say they taste a syrupy sweet on the back of their tongue, I did not taste honey, I tasted the bitter lemons from my grandmother’s tree, electric like batteries. Some say they see a bright white tunnel, others say they see darkness, I did not see light nor dark. Growing from the left hand corner of my left eye, following the curvature of my eyelids, I saw the mirror in the mirror.