Museum “Everything We Are”

“I've spent years trying to explain things in terms that people would understand, but the best I can manage is for people to think I just have a very active imagination, that despite no predilection for creative matters whatsoever in my youth and beyond, I am merely lost and eccentric.

Things of imagination?

I don't much care for them, my mind always keyed into things that are tangible and real, that I can see and touch. It was astronomy that fascinated me as a child, not TV shows or movies, and I remember clearly pouring over volumes of books, memorizing all the constellations and when they would appear in the night sky.

My interest allowed me to make friends with a few, but mostly it caused me to spend many nights planted behind a telescope, looking up into the night sky for anything of interest, hoping against hope that I would find something new and go down in the annals of history as some new hero who managed to get something named after them.

I've lost that desire now, losing much of the pleasure I used to get when looking at the night sky, though I cannot resist the urge to do so anyway.

I have seen something in the night sky that is new, that to any other asshole would would be a wonderful discovery, but not me.

In astronomy, things are often measured in ways that are hard to truly comprehend. The true scope of the objects, stars, and planets that make up the broader universe are simply too big to comprehend without first resorting to describing them in metaphorical terms.

We say that we are but a grain of sand next to the sun, and that the sun is but a grain of sand to some of the larger stars we know of, but that hardly truly encompasses the true scope of these stars and galaxies, and just how small we are in comparison.

This object is for some reason hard to see, and I am one of the only people to notice it despite the size I've calculated it at. It seems that there is something else, something outside of rational science that makes this so.

I cannot find another explanation, though I have tried desperately to prove I really am crazy.

And maybe I am.

Some days I get the urge to look again upon the night sky, to let me eyes focus on the distant objects who's light may have ceased to burn long long ago. And on those nights, when I foolishly decide that just one more look wouldn't hurt, I am rendered inert for weeks after, unable to let go of the horror...and the pain.

Sometimes it is smiling. Sometimes it is laughing or frowning. But more than that, it seems completely unaware of our existence.

That's all we are.

That's all we can be.

I keep looking, hoping for something different. But it doesn't get easier.

The scope of it...

That darkness with a face.

A grain of sand upon a grain of sand.”

I like to write when it rains. I can't help it, even when I know there are other things I would like to be doing. I had promised myself that I would get to those things first so they wouldn't remain in the back on my mind, but the rain has a quality that calls to me, and if I ignore it, then nothing I do afterward is going to be done.

I will simply sit in a fugue state, unable to advance and more than able to retract, because some part of me knows that the calling isn't something that I can let go. I cannot be me without first being in tune, and if that means I must write when it rains, than that is simply what must happen.

I have no choice.

A candle burns in my house that smells of vanilla and lavender, but there are other smells that I have stuck within my mind that are much stronger, and though the rain is too cold and the ground too wet for me to truly indulge in them, they stand out as a memory in my mind that feels like a curtain, weighing down the present.

It is the smell of mud, the sound of the rain in puddles, the gravely taste of rain collected on a street, and the unmistakable smell of worms.

There are no worms right now, even though it is raining. Normally there is a all sorts of things that come out when it rains, but worms are the most active and common, and I can remember trampling over them on my way home from grade school, rushing from the bus stop with my jacket pulled up and over my head.

My mother tried to do my hair every morning, and she never much liked it when I would come home with my hair in a mess. So I got into the habit of watching out for it in a absent sort of way, and when it rains, even with my mom dead, I know that there is a rain cap in my pocket.

It may make me look like an old lady, but my hair will stay dry.

But sometimes I don't know it is going to rain, and when it does I can't prepare.

And it is only at those moments when I feel free.

My mom has been gone for so long, and I have done everything I can think of to recover from it. But she is gone and I am not, and even before things got hard between dad and I, things had already been difficult.

He never recovered, or at least that is how it seems.

And I try so very hard to always be ready for the rain.

But some days it doesn't rain at all.

And some days...

It rains without warning.

And as I walk and dance and skip about in the rain, a grin upon my face-

A giggling on my lips.

Then I am free.

I wonder if it is the same as it is for you with with the sunrise? Do you smell the crisp grass, or the damp flowers even when the night closes in?

Is it the same?

I have tried to confirm the statements made above, but despite speaking to several persons in the firm know, I was unable to get anyone to speculate on a great darkness in space, save for the Boötes void, otherwise known as the “Great Nothing”, an area of space virtually wholly absent of stars and other objects.