laugh hard, it’s a long way to the ground; any

[Carinae]

astra inclinant, non necessitant ------ (the stars incline; they do not compel) She wonders if meteors remember falling. She does not. What she remembers is this: she had been there, as usual. Usual being a strange term, of course, for nothing was usual about the way she grew up, the way she watched galaxies fall into black holes, the way time seemed to go on both forever and not at all, the way she existed without oxygen, was able to subsist on nothingness. She had been there, and perhaps she had been watching her sister – she often did, she liked the liquidity of her movements, tried to mirror them. Maybe she had closed her eyes. Maybe she hadn’t. There had been no sense of falling. It was more like waking from a dream. She went from nothingness to grass beneath her feet, coat changed from ink blackness tinged with the cosmos to a bright blue studded with clouds. Suddenly space was beyond her reach again and she was terrestrial. She wonders, on her worse nights, if it had been a dream. She wonders this as she learns more and more of how impossible it was, to live the way she had. But then there are other nights, nights like tonight when she can practically taste starlight on her tongue and she knows it was real, all of it was real. She spots the twins as they spot her. She takes in their own coloring, the pinks and grays and golds. She offers a smile, hesitant but there, although perhaps unnoticed in the play of shadows. “I can’t remember,” she says, quite honestly, “it was like I blinked, and then I was here.” carinae