moons and starstuff

and interconnected bodies

Photo by Mary Hammel on Unsplash

Imagine / you / such a beautiful moon
hanging
silver
sometimes waning or waxing
pulling on oceans and haunting the shadows
yet cold and alone 
in a void of black / stillness / bathed in radiation and dust
Or perhaps a small planet
Planetoid? Like a novella of rock and dust and starstuff
and still 
isolated
spinning / orbiting / drifting
Do you know
that there are others
just beyond reach
reflected light no more than a wink
Here we are, dancing quietly / soundlessly
catching distant starlight with our backs
our faces
limbs tucked
to spin us faster around ourselves
and all the while we are within grasp
of a multitude

I think sometimes that we get this isolated feeling, this perspective that we are utterly alone in a world full of other people who are also utterly alone, and to some extent that’s true. We create the isolation, we inherit it from the billboards and AI slop ads and alexa devices and oh-my-god-are-we-still-falling-victim-to-social-media, and our ingrown filters fail us, and we double down on us-against-the-world and I-guess-I’ll-just-do-it-myself and nobody-is-coming-to-rescue-you.

Stop for a sec. Inhale, feel your body expand, feel your beating heart. Decide when you are ready to let that CO2 back out into the world, and remember that your air feeds the plants around you, and those plants use your spent CO2 and sunlight and spin up the Calvin cycle and chug out oxygen, and I breathe that oxygen, and—dammit—none of us are really alone out here.

This came up in a casual conversation, as do many of the things that prompt me to write. A friend casually mentioned that they felt a bit like a celestial body, spinning, lonely, out in the void of space, and their words really struck something deep inside of me, like being seen or acknowledged. I’ve been spinning on my own. But have I?

Am I really as alone as I think?

Well clearly not. Here’s you reading my words right now. Here’s you, a part of a community of people who might be reading this exact sentence at exactly the same moment. And even if you’re experiencing it differently, even if you put a different emphasis on one word or another, here you both are. Here you all are.

Here we are.

Please don’t forget that you cannot help but be interconnected. It’s out of your control. I’m so sorry if you need control over this and I’m telling you that you cannot have it, and I can relate. It drives me a little nuts, too.

But here we are.

Here we are.

The machines that tell us to buy things or to sell things or to subscribe to things or to repost things or to read things or to absorb things or to consume things don’t want you feeling this inherent connection you share with me and with the multitudes of me’s sharing our CO2 and oxygen with you. They don’t want you feeling less alone. They thrive on our isolation. They thrive on our hunger.

And here we are, giving them the finger. Hell yeah.

Your trans friend,

Robin