the blueshift journal

i.      
Supervoids are bleak. Scant of matter and energy, so vast that it’s likely they came to be by the convergence of at least two smaller voids.

 

ii.                

The first time I entered The Void—the last house before the railroad tracks, the center of our memories—you weren’t home. Your roommate met me at the door leading me through the
house. I stepped over things I did not understand: ground marijuana, puff-paint pens, and a white mug that asked “What would Jesus do?” You were an atheist.

 

iii.

Your home had four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a basement, and an attic. All congested with junk usually consisting of dry beer bottles and suspiciously clean laundry; decorative cobwebs, dirty dishes, and sheets that had been finger-painted at a party with acrylics.

 

iv.

Because of their lack of substance, voids actually have very little gravitational pull, with the
exception of their edges, where their gravity is the strongest. And it’s the edges that bring them together.

 

Or maybe it's the emptiness that does it. Making the already lifeless space more miserable, like the distance I feel the world created between you and I. The closer I am to you the larger our void grows.

 

v.

Middle school and high school were white spaces, devoid of brown people. I was a speck in it all. My parents thought that I was lonely. They thought I lost myself. I was. I did.  

 

You found me in the last week before classes started, in a program for the university’s incoming “diverse” students.  

 

Your mild annoyance towards the whole program was what pulled me to you, and I didn’t fight it. I didn’t want to be lost again.

 

vi.            

Voids are defined by their lack of superclusters—communities of galaxies.  

 

Though you’ve graduated and moved on, many of the friends I have now are with me because of you. I met them at the house shows you and your roommate would host at The Void; in the living room while decorating your jacket with puff paint; in the kitchen when making pesto mushrooms. And in the cuddle piles your roommate’s bed.  

 

The largest supervoid in the universe lacks ten thousand less galaxies than expected; one trillion stars less than expected.

 

Yet there’s a scarce number of superclusters in this supervoid. These are the most precious; these are the only lights in the darkness.

 

vii.              

I parked my car in front of The Void and asked if you were okay. It was late and you had a long day and I knew that you were not okay. I said that you didn't have to go in right away if you wanted to talk.
          It’s about Audrey, you said. I think we’re going to break up after she goes back to Hawaii.  

          But she loves you, I said.

          Love didn’t keep her from hurting you, though, did it?

 

viii.

I was never allowed to attend sleepovers. I was never allowed to host sleepovers. Mom and Dad were strict about “just who they were letting in” their home.  

 

ix.

But you were an exception—the only person I brought home with me during freshman year. I was back for the weekend and you wanted to tag along to see another friend who was also from my hometown. We shared my bed and watched Moonrise Kingdom on your laptop. We scrolled through Tumblr.  

 

x.

A year later, I was wrapped in your sleeping bag, on the floor of your dorm room staring into the darkness of the ceiling. Our sleepover was winding down, and before we said good night, you told me you were gay.

 

xi.              

The spring before you left for India was hot enough for us to chill topless on the front lawn of The Void after classes. The yard faced a busy street in the small town, right across from RedOx, where you bought your Nerds rope and I bought my Angry Orchard and Arizona tea. Sometimes cars would honk angrily at us—they couldn’t call the cops on us because our yellow duct tape censored our nipples in fat crosses. Though most of the time cars wouldn’t honk, people would stare. I’d watch their heads lean out of open windows and hang on the image of us: you vaping and watching Netflix in your hammock, and I lying on my back in the grass reading a book. Sometimes you’d flick them off and I’d laugh. The last picture I took of you was in front of The Void, topless, no duct tape. Middle fingers up. The old Canon shuttered as a horn screamed back at us.  

 

xii.              

Fall semester, your first since moving out of The Void. Your last semester before graduating and going to India. That semester hurt me the most because it felt like The Void imploded.

 

xiii.

It hurt because I got my nose pierced. Right in the middle. In the septum. I went to see you in your new place, The Abyss you called it, in Over the Rhine. You liked my nose ring, you loved it, you said. And I told you that I loved it too, but my parents didn’t. They said it made me look like an ox or a bull.

​

xiv.                  

Do you think that God won’t let me into heaven because I love you? I’m convinced that my
parents think so—they keep telling me that I need to make new friends.

          I like to believe that God won’t exclude me for loving my gender-queer atheist friend. If God sends me to hell, I’d rather be with you in the dirt and mushrooms; sand and crystals. I want
to be divided across the universe.  

 

xv.            

I think the world can be crueler than anyone can explain.  

 

xvi.

The theory of the big bang is obscure to me; I don’t understand it, but I wish it happened differently when it thrust us into existence. I wish our universe came to be in such a way that the marginalized didn’t have to die in corners of the earth and that people didn’t have to hide in closets.

​

xvii.

The largest individual structure identified by humanity is a supervoid spanning 1.8 billion lightyears across. It is more frostbitten and barren than the big bang can explain.  

​

xviii.            

I burst into your roommate’s bedroom on the edge of the first real tears that spring. Her room was a communal space, and although she was not there, I knew you would be—watching Bob’s Burgers and eating Kroger brand fruit loops from the bag on her bed.
          Boys are stupid, I said staring into the setting sun out the window.

          Then I told you that I was stupid. That I was naïve for putting effort into someone when they didn’t care about me at all.
          It was the end of spring semester. I should have been spending my energy studying for exams and writing instead of chasing friendship with some guy. And suddenly I’d flung myself over your roommate’s foam mattress in a fit of tears, wailing from my stomach; I cried so hard that my whole body tremored. I apologized for interrupting your time alone, but you just rubbed my back told me I didn’t deserve hurt.

​

xix.

I’m glad you never saw my mom’s face when I told her you were gay.  

 

xx.

We were in the kitchen. She was shuffling back and forth at the window, loading dirty plates into the dishwasher and I was sitting behind her at the table. She said something homophobic in passing and I said that if gay people were so bad then how could you be such an incredible blessing to me.

          They slept over, don’t you remember?
          She paused on the tile and turned to me. I watched her expectations of me fall from her
eyes; she looked at me like I’d invited hell onto her doorstep, as if God would strike them into oblivion for having a friend over.
          You can’t do that to us, Amber.
It never occurred to me that having gay friends “wasn’t allowed”.  

 

xxi.            

And yet you still love me, and it’s one of my greatest privileges.

​

xxii.           
I don’t see myself in your future like I wish I could. I don’t think it’s fair that I can’t go to your wedding if you want to get married without condemnation from all of my relatives. I don’t think it’s fair that you can open the doors of your home to me but I can’t do the same for you without protest from my family.  

 

xxiii.

There are many who are like me who must choose between family and friends. For most I think the choice is easy, but for me, rejecting my family is like rejecting gravity. I wonder how many others are as scared as I am to drift without gravity; I wonder if they are isolated in this way, and if I will ever cross paths with them.  

 

xxiv.

Even though there are sixty galaxies in the largest supervoid known to man, though it can still feel lonely when the emptiness spans for over one billion lightyears.

​

xxv.

I’ll just have to pray for them, Mom said.

They’re atheist, I said.
There’s nothing God can’t fix.

​

xxvi.    

We were back in The Void—alone, as we usually were, under the twinkle lights of your roommate’s bedroom; we decided to watch cartoons from our childhood. An early episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender was playing on your laptop. It was an episode about life, and how life was everywhere and the lives of everything would always be intertwined with one another. I told you that it made me think about death and that scared me, but you weren’t scared of dying like I was—
I’ll be in the dirt and mushrooms; sand and crystals. The same atoms that made me will make the stars. Won’t that be so cool?