Spaghettification II
Published in An Áitiúl Anthology, 2024.
It is twenty five to four in the morning, again, and I am sitting on the toilet in a stranger’s house. There are bruises on my knees behind which beats my slackening pulse. I leave the door open. From the bedroom I can hear snoring, and the street outside the open window. From somewhere out there, a car horn calls. Dublin is restless, as ever. It is here that I think again about black holes. I reach for my phone, perched on the edge of the acrylic bath, the face of the tub sallow in the light. In astrophysics, my phone says, spaghettification is the tidal effect caused by strong gravitation fields. The description is accompanied by an image of an astronaut falling into a black hole. Their arms are raised like they’re going down a waterslide in some Spanish waterpark. You can’t see their face, their joy is hidden behind a visor, its colour the same as the black hole in which they are being pulled. Their limbs elongate the further they fall until they are one long string. Like spaghetti. I look at the image until tears form on the precipice of my eyelids, and when they breach I lean into them until I am lying naked on the cold tiles of someone else’s bathroom floor, weeping.
It is seven minutes past four in the morning and I am home again, or what I have been calling home. Dublin stopped feeling like home some time ago now, if it ever did at all. I think of my life as a bus stop – or a Luas stop – waiting for something to pull up in front of me, to take me somewhere better. I’ve been trying to write a novel but it has been evading me. It takes some shape under my fingertips but rather than staying on the page, it leers at me and takes flight. I chase it around my life, but it remains perpetually out of reach. It is air and light, taking whatever shape it feels like, filling and vacating space as it pleases. I curse at it as it slinks away from me, but I think I am more to blame for this than the novel is. Foolish of me to think something so alive should remain stationary forever. After all, how is it to know how much it may change my life, how much purpose it might instil in me. Only I can know that, and I don’t. I was angry at Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde, before, for stealing all the beautiful words, and leaving none for me. But now I think I pity them. It seems to me the most painful affliction in the world, to be a writer. I think that I should quit it while I still can. Instead, I sleep and try my best to forget.
It is thirty three minutes past six in the morning when I wake. I have forgotten nothing. My mind is a bar matt catching all the vinegary dregs of my existence. Some weeks ago my grandmother died. It’s not exactly my first brush with death, but it’s certainly the closest. I had an online girlfriend when I was fifteen who killed herself, and I thought I knew then what grief was. The low and angry roar of it. But I was so young, and had no idea the intricacies as young things do not. Grief, as it turns out, is indiscernible. It is the bottom of a dive pool, dark and completely unknowable. It is a language not meant to be understood. It was a long, drawn out death – it took her more than two weeks to finally die. We joked towards the end with her, though she wasn’t awake and we were sure she couldn’t hear us anymore. Would you hurry up and do it so we can get on with our lives? Little did we know there would be little getting on to do. When she was buried, I told myself in those ambiguous corridors of time, it will be better. It will be easier. I reach through time now but my hand draws short of me then, sitting in that hospital room, watching her wane like a candle. Words escape me completely, then and now. It is not, I say to the wind, and to time itself. It is not easier. It may not ever be.
It is two in the afternoon. I quit Dublin then for a while, after. I go home to Down. August is flowering around me, and I think how terrible it is to die in summer. Those morose things you think happen only in winter, in the rain and the cold. Death as befitting of the darkness. But we knelt and stood and knelt and stood in the chapel and sweat from the heat, and I realised finally that beautiful things can as easily die in summer as they can bloom. I stepped up to the alter for a reading, but I had no idea what I was saying and when it was over I sat again in the pew at the front and had the most horrible thought. All my life, any time I’ve been to Mass, it was with her. My grandmother. This was the first time I’d come to that place without her, and it was for her funeral. At the beach I watch the tide lick the bay. I take my phone out to take a picture. When I unlock the device, the webpage about spaghettification is still open. It will always be open. I sit down on the pebbled strip before the sand begins in earnest and I start to cry. Years ago I wrote about spaghettification, and I tried to make a metaphor for myself as a black hole, a dead star in the wide, open oblivion, my nothingness falling in on itself. But again, I was wrong. Not until this moment do I understand grief, truly. I was never the black hole, not really. It was my grief. And behind all the machinations of my life it is been turning and burning and waiting for me to fall into it.
It is sometime later, the light on the horizon is just waking up or it is just falling asleep, and here I am, falling into that black hole, finally.
Jamie Ryan Anderson
