What will you miss about this world?

What things will you long to know again?

Somewhere within the show Invasion, there is this beautiful scene where someone asks an astronaut what she was going to miss most when she leaves the stratosphere. Her response?

The weight of things.

And wouldn’t you?

[unearthed from the archive: originally posted June 8, 2023]

FLOATING

Earlier this year, I got really sick.

I remember crawling out of bed in the middle of the night, going outside, and pressing my body to the cold cement. I was soaked in sweat and deliriously staring up at a full moon. I don’t remember much else. But I do remember the strange and startling desire that came over me in that moment to simply feel the weight of normal things again. And as someone who feels a lot, those things can be heavy.

Anxiety makes sure of that. It has for my whole life. Especially when I was younger and didn’t understand what was happening. I didn’t know why I felt the urge to stop swinging from a tree and run inside before an odd looking car got from the end of the street to the front of my house. I would just do it.

Now, I do know what is happening and it can still bring me to my knees. So daily life can sometimes feel like a lot, even when it shouldn’t. Little things can be big things. I drink lavender tea and go for long walks and I write. I talk to myself and stand in front of the ocean and place my palms to my heart. These things help.

THE MEANING OF FEELING

But the point is, when I was lying on the cold, wet concrete in the middle of a winter night, everything else felt so small.

All of those things that had seemed so large, so life-threatening, just the other day, were suddenly nothing at all. They felt like dreams. I ached with an ache that came from my bones to just cook dinner and watch HGTV again. To have a normal, boring, day. To dance and laugh and cry. To wonder about the rest of the week and the rest of my life and if I would ever feel love like I did at sixteen ever again.

I wanted to feel the weight of those things again.

Weight is not bad. Weight is meaning.There is weight to pleasure just like there is weight to pain. It’s how you know that you are alive. Do you know how awful it must feel? To be in space? To be completely untethered from the only force that has ever been able to promise that it will never let you go? To not feel anything, not even the weight of your own flesh? Your own mind?

We say that we want to float, to fly. To be free from all that keeps our feet on this ground. But we don’t. Not really. I don’t. Maybe because I know what it’s like to be numb, to not feel anything. Or maybe because I know that beautiful, creative things come from the elephants that stand upon our chests. If gravity died, art would die with it.

We need things to feel heavy. That’s how we know that they are important and that we are alive enough to feel their effect.

GROUNDED

I can stare at the stars all night.

I can point to Mars and Venus and connect the dots of every constellation. I can trace the curve of the crescent moon like the dip of a lover’s back. I can tell you about stellar fusion and the entire life cycle of a star because when I was sixteen I used to write poems about it all. I used to draw Saturn in the margins of my notes and dream of another world, of any other world than the one that I was in. Everything felt so heavy. I was still just learning to walk with anything other than dandelion petals in my palms. I was still just learning the weight of things, and how to carry them. So I would stare into the sky every night. It made whatever I was going through feel so finite.

My mother used to say that it must be good for your eyes to stare into the sky, into all of that never ending blueness. As a kid, I didn’t understand this. I thought she meant physically. I agreed that it did feel nice.

But now, I see how she was right. It must be good for your eyes because what else can open them to the vastness of this world and the smallness of you. As a teenager, this made me want to rip through the stratosphere like a cat’s claws through a curtain and find my way elsewhere. I fell in love with the abyss for everything that it promised me. I wanted to crawl inside of it. The idea of floating, of being weightless, sounded just like a dream.

Not anymore.

Now I want to live on this planet so badly that it makes my feet hurt from all of the places that they have yet to step. I want to live so badly that it feels as if I will never have enough time. I want to touch the ground and feel the waves kissing at my ankles. I want coffee. I want warm sunlight and buttered toast. I don’t want weightlessness. I love the feeling of my feet against the ground. I love falling.

I love knowing that the earth will catch me.

Maybe I think about it too much. Maybe my obsession with mortality and existential ambiguity and the incomprehensible infinity of the world in which our earth is merely one trillionth of a speck of sand within, is unhealthy. But when I was walking the other day I stopped to put my feet in the ocean and when I looked down at them I saw that the water was reflecting the whole sky. And I saw that my feet, standing in that water, were reflecting my whole existence.

To be alive in that moment felt like a very serious and a very silly thing and I felt the full weight of that.

love, m.

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