Spaceship Atlas
by Hannah Cajandig-Taylor
When somebody is reading aloud in a coffee shop and the birds are looking for a warmer corner of the planet, all I can hear is the space between the slick yellow hardwood and the heavy glass door, all scuffed and tar-colored from people coming and going, wanting and leaving.
Arriving--this nostalgic, palpable tinge of sunshine; breathing. Before I trotted into elementary school, my parents let me choose the paint color for my bedroom walls. The carpet was a rugged, wooly blue; so of course I put my heart into a pale, lightbulb yellow—the color of a crème-de-la-crème rose that would have been stunning, had the floor not looked like dingy seawater.
And I loved it. I loved it so much that my ceiling was a canvas for pasted-on stars, glowing after the lights danced off, reflecting the leftover gentle brightness towards my pillowcase. I loved it so much that I started to love everything else with that house and the universe.
I loved reading about singularity for the first time. I loved the ugly abstract paint on the bathroom walls, the volatile shades of maroon and olive and fake-plant green; I loved it so much that after my parents divorced and we eventually moved out of that house, I wrote my dad a 4-page letter against painting over it. Despite the practicality of our landlord’s suggestion, I insisted that the wall meant so much to me that it could never be lost to history, and that if it went down, I was going down with it. In this early practice of persuasion, I poured myself into vivid descriptions of the animals I could see in the messy splatter of color.
One could say that I don’t really do well with change. After the educational institution decided that a bunch of second graders performing Aesop’s Fables with Styrofoam puppets was actually an awkward necessity, my mom helped me fashion the perfect scarecrow for my trio’s skit. I don’t even remember what it was supposed to mean—but in a dream last night, after I outran a tornado along a body of water expanding more quickly than the galaxy itself, my hands took their time across the stiff red felt; lacing my fingers in the brown jungle of soft stringy hair, a familiar and comfortable entanglement.
My googly-eyed, stick-operated, stuffed-with-artificial-earthen-byproduct scarecrow was ready to play her part. Nobody ever taught me the story about the girl who mapped an atlas of the stars and used it to keep herself warm in the Michigan snow, or the story about the girl who drives a car the color of an exit sign out past Big Bay to chase the Northern Lights. Maybe if they had, these tides would have a little more distance; my fingers would collapse under the weight of this poorly crafted thing trying to drive away creatures with wings.
And if this had been the story I was taught, when I was a solar flare in church-dress yellow, maybe I would have noticed it from the start-- I’ve been fed flying from a young age.
When somebody is reading aloud in a coffee shop and the birds are looking for a warmer corner of the planet, all I can hear is the space between the slick yellow hardwood and the heavy glass door, all scuffed and tar-colored from people coming and going, wanting and leaving.
Arriving--this nostalgic, palpable tinge of sunshine; breathing. Before I trotted into elementary school, my parents let me choose the paint color for my bedroom walls. The carpet was a rugged, wooly blue; so of course I put my heart into a pale, lightbulb yellow—the color of a crème-de-la-crème rose that would have been stunning, had the floor not looked like dingy seawater.
And I loved it. I loved it so much that my ceiling was a canvas for pasted-on stars, glowing after the lights danced off, reflecting the leftover gentle brightness towards my pillowcase. I loved it so much that I started to love everything else with that house and the universe.
I loved reading about singularity for the first time. I loved the ugly abstract paint on the bathroom walls, the volatile shades of maroon and olive and fake-plant green; I loved it so much that after my parents divorced and we eventually moved out of that house, I wrote my dad a 4-page letter against painting over it. Despite the practicality of our landlord’s suggestion, I insisted that the wall meant so much to me that it could never be lost to history, and that if it went down, I was going down with it. In this early practice of persuasion, I poured myself into vivid descriptions of the animals I could see in the messy splatter of color.
One could say that I don’t really do well with change. After the educational institution decided that a bunch of second graders performing Aesop’s Fables with Styrofoam puppets was actually an awkward necessity, my mom helped me fashion the perfect scarecrow for my trio’s skit. I don’t even remember what it was supposed to mean—but in a dream last night, after I outran a tornado along a body of water expanding more quickly than the galaxy itself, my hands took their time across the stiff red felt; lacing my fingers in the brown jungle of soft stringy hair, a familiar and comfortable entanglement.
My googly-eyed, stick-operated, stuffed-with-artificial-earthen-byproduct scarecrow was ready to play her part. Nobody ever taught me the story about the girl who mapped an atlas of the stars and used it to keep herself warm in the Michigan snow, or the story about the girl who drives a car the color of an exit sign out past Big Bay to chase the Northern Lights. Maybe if they had, these tides would have a little more distance; my fingers would collapse under the weight of this poorly crafted thing trying to drive away creatures with wings.
And if this had been the story I was taught, when I was a solar flare in church-dress yellow, maybe I would have noticed it from the start-- I’ve been fed flying from a young age.