Orion in The eye of every storm

Orion appears from the east, arrow taut and upward, frozen solid in a motionless image millions of years old, and we’re just now seeing him, connecting the dots into a hunter, into a warrior. It’s human to project onto the heavens. They’ve created us, and in return, we have created them et in fabulam, et in legenda. Irony rears its head and bleeds deep stab wounds across the universe for he is frozen in time, and irony takes a dying breath realizing we think we’re so different, that we’re free, that we’re light and love and glory. We are all destruction. We are all creation, and we’ll never know it, but we’ll never die.

It’s getting colder at night but I like the way my feet press against the concrete. I’m standing in my underwear and a T-shirt, tracing the line down his arrow, passed his bow, millions of miles down his arm, and another several million to his heart. His vast, empty, hollow vacuum heart, and I remember random sequences:

We were young and stupid, taking ecstasy. Your kids were at a sitters house, and it was just us. In Rainbows had just been released. You were wearing a plaid skirt on purpose, sitting in just a way where I caught all the right peaks as we were peaking. I melted into you. Lying there we touched each other, explored every tip of each other, every exposed piece of skin could not escape our quivering fingertips. Our lips barely touched, open mouth, mine just between yours, both parted, and our breath felt like the voice of God. The room was dark save for a few candles, and in that moment, I loved you more than I’d loved anything in the whole world. You were the Grand Canyon, wide, open, deep, mysterious. You were an archipelago, each island within you culturing a different tribe with its own customs. You were Everest, bold, and intimidating. You were the soft New England autumn leaves that carpeted the forest floor in beautiful colors. You were a blue whale, and you were Alaska, and you were Jupiter; the biggest of your kinds.

Another year escaped us, not a summer of love, but of difficulty. We lost each other constantly in front of one another. I’d say I’m sorry and you’d say it’s nobody’s fault. How much structure I had. I wanted to be blamed or I wanted to blame you. It was that anger that put a wedge between us, nailed it into the ground like a monument, and I packed up my jeep and moved two states away to pretend to escape me, but I still said your name, and I still said I was sorry.

Staring into the constellation, I keep wondering if you’re staring at it. The angle would be different for you, now that we’re five states apart. Now that we’re so different. You’re a grandmother now, something unexpected. I’m married, also something unexpected. I guess it catches up to you, all of the time. So yeah, it’s different to you. Maybe he’s relaxed his arm. He doesn’t want to hunt any longer. Maybe he’s currently exploding, and we don’t know, but astronomers millions of years from now will report it on the news, and somehow Shepherd Smith will still be alive, bitching about the story.

They tell me there’s great lessons in History. Statues are art that explained the environment of the times. Museums are for learning, for studying, to grow and not repeat. They’re pieces and artifacts of puzzles that explain what the hell happened before us. Before us. I’d build us a museum, you know. Yeah. I would.

One of the halls would contain board games and Easter Egg hunts with your children. We’d continue to a mock up of your small kitchen, spaghetti on the stove, me trying your sauce and then kissing your lips, saying, “tell me what you think now.” Artist renderings of our trips to North Carolina the night you looked at me and said, “Let’s do something fun, let’s take the kids to Chuck E. Cheese, or do you have a better idea.”

“Let’s drive north until we find snow,” I said, and I kept you in love with me that night, the kids in the backseat and somewhere in North Carolina we found a cheap motel, laid the kids in the bed, and sat outside and crunched the flakes beneath our feet.

The Hall of Hopes and Dreams, the largest exhibit, forever remaining empty, because when we left each other, they were crushed. The floor would be covered in dust, and each day new visitors foot prints would walk all over us, and you’d undoubtedly call it art. It’s hardly art. But that was you and that was me.

The final exhibits a sandstone carving of you and I, embraced, posed as Canova’s “Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss.” We’re the only one’s allowed to touch it. The Visitors are roped off, distant, and not a part of this exhibit. This one is just us, but they’re allowed to watch it collapse. I know, in our faintest memories, on nights like tonight, every time we go underneath that velvet rope and touch our statue, pieces of it crumble off and become infinite grains of sand scattered across the floor. I know if I touch you enough, if you touch me enough, we’ll be swept away, and like our time together, our museum would no longer serve a purpose.

There’d be no more statue. We’d be dead and buried, born again into trees in different environmental regions, and I’d house the birds and you’d house the snakes. A fire will scatter our ashes and we’ll become some foundation, some fossil eventually. Civilizations will be built atop us, and collapse, and eventually we’ll compress into petrol and maybe we’ll fill someone’s tanks, turn into exhaust, and vanish into the atmosphere, into space, finally on our way to meet Orion. But Orion’s not there anymore, and he never caught what he was after.

Last updated October 18, 2017