By Dorian Winter
This piece first appeared as a featured article in volume 95, issue six of Pelican. You can view our print archive here.
Layer 1, Ectoderm
At age 7, you have already assembled a personal metronome. It sprawls along the grand piano like an outstretched sphinx and wiggles its whiskers to the pit-a-pat of your heartbeat. First it was Bach, then Mozart, then Liszt – and then one morning you find yourself wrapped in sheet music, playfully contorted into a tiny origami boat, navigating eastwards, cusping on stars and deep gravitational fields.
Today, you cry, because you feel the electrical charge of star stuff congeal in your nose and throat, and you feel brief telecommunications leave from the base of your spine to your medulla, propelling you up, up above, into a tea party of deceased stars who perpetually pour you a cosmic latte.
When you look up at the night sky, everything you see is the distant memory of somebody else. It’s all new to you, in that godly exhale of cirrus clouds and condensation. You realise quietly: us humans have spent years upon years building rocket ships to explore celestial graveyards. In 1977, we sent an array of flower photographs to these headstones, as well as music, human voices, and the lonely whine of the humpback whale.
For years you wish you weren’t as young as you were – you had so much to say to that big cosmic umbrella in the sky. Instead of fixating on a God, or on some sort of karmic retribution, you held the sharp metal of the Southern Cross between the gap in your front teeth and wailed.
Layer 2, Mesoderm
At age 11, shame grows inside of you like an insidious teratoma, freckled with grotesque, half-formed eyes and hair. Nestled against the plush of your stomach is a clone we can call “the preteen”, who watches from afar as his classmates play handball, and eats the pages of chapter books for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The crisp footsteps of your father’s work oxfords are percussive against the hum of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s voice on the TV. The cosmos opens their maw and swallow you up, you’ll have to wait years before you come out the other end.
You learn to hear the faint whispers of electricity as they giggle out of the Wi-Fi modem. You learn to cup your hands over your ears at the first aria of pure, unadulterated silence. Finally, you learn to imagine your parents in the room with you, clapping their hands and reading you stories. The air is stale and smells like Glen20.
Layer 3, Endoderm
You’re almost 20 and your body is split between cold nights in the countryside and equally hypothermic evenings in the heart of the city. In a sort of drunken reverie, you flirt with the idea of blurring your vision as the cars swerve past, enveloping your body in the nightclub motion of nonchalant jaywalking. The entire CBD is one massive black hole, and you loosen your shoulders and shudder as it swallows you whole.
You can now confidently say that you’re happy to be a human. That you, and you alone, have been chosen to feel your organs expand and contract, to feel the fire of whiskey taut against your cheeks and stomach, to have your skin flush warm at the kiss of a cold breeze, or rather, when you see them again. Had you been an animal, or a plant, or a robot, you would never know the satisfaction of this constellation of sensation, the pains and pleasures of being human.
The great big eye of the full moon undresses itself in the reflection of the river at 10:38pm. You watch the memory of a child pass you by, wrapping his hands around Orion’s belt, and feeling as a stigmata burns through the flesh of his palms.
In your Dad’s new office, the old whiteboard that dominated your high school study sessions still has a shadow of whiteboard ink left behind, reading:
“Per aspera ad astra.”
“Through adversity to the stars.”