Surrounded by air and invisible strings attaching to all corners of the universe, there lies a star in the sky. The star’s name is Vincent, his moniker bearing the stamp of the famous painter on Earth to whom his mother was introduced when one of his paintings was lost in space and drifted across her gaze.
Vincent is lazy, and his breath is a series of inhalations and exhalations shaped by boredom. He has learned not to expect entertainment from his fellow floating orbs. The splendor of their illumination is juxtaposed by their inability to sing or dance or, in any way, delight his fancy. They lie scattered across the galaxy, telling stories about the things they’ve never done, the places they’ve never been, and the memories they’ve never actually made.
The sky is not liquid, but it is still. Except when comets come screaming past their stuck counterparts, or when a star burns out and drifts away, movement is not allowed. Change rarely occurs. Vincent is fixed in a fixed state, and he has given in to the stuckness of his existence.
Vivienne is newer. Relatively new. She has not yet lost the fervor of her “what if” and dreams of destinations beyond the darkness and points of light by which she is surrounded. Vivienne is vivacious and full of wonder. Her curves have not yet been chipped away by the chisels of time or NASA’s rumbling past her looser rocks. She is intelligent, bright, an artist at her core who does not spend time lamenting her lack of limbs. Instead, she fills the sky with her songs and laughter and tells stories born in the dreams she has when she closes her eyes to sleep.
One day, a spacecraft flown by human hands nicked the side of Vincent’s ribs. It was clearly an unintended greeting, and it caused Vincent a lazy amount of consternation.
“The NASAs don’t understand space, am I right?” he dribbled out sarcastically as his body reacted to the impact, shifting ever so slightly to the right.
As his roundness rotated by infinitesimal degrees, Vincent suddenly saw a new perspective. The view he had held for centuries had been just slightly off to the left. As his eyes adjusted, he whispered into the darkness, “What the—”
Newness.
Vincent shook his head and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again, trying to adjust his vision. A bit near-sighted, he had to refocus once more. When his eyes opened the second time, his heart filled with wonder. He could see stars he had never seen before. A draft brushed against his back in an unfamiliar way. The stars newly visible to him were sleeping, ignoring the NASA that had just shifted his perspective.
One of the stars he had never seen before was snoring.
As Vincent would later learn, the snoring star’s name is Dick. Dick, known as Richard to those with whom he is not well acquainted, wears a smoking jacket and smokes a pipe in his mind. He pontificates on matters such as the romantic lives of the earliest stars and prides himself on knowing intimate details about the moons surrounding each of the planets.
For centuries, a rumor circulated that Dick once sent notes of love and longing to Europa. Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, has a voice like a hushed flute, high, soft, arresting. Dick’s love notes were legendary, poetic, stirring a romance so engaging that hardly any stars within several light-years slept during the centuries of their affair.
Until Europa broke his heart by falling in love with another of Jupiter’s moons, Ganymede. Since then, Europa and Ganymede have whispered to one another, keeping their romance private. Ganymede is not nearly as showy a suitor as Dick.
And so, the sky lost its drama. It returned to the mundane: blackness, occasional pirate songs, the same stories told to the same stars, over and over again. The order of the sky began to resemble the Moose Lodge from The Flintstones, the same people, the same stories, the same faces.
Until the gods allowed a NASA to nick Vincent’s side.
That small disruption sparked the possibility of new sightlines, new encounters with stars whose old stories would be new to him. When two personalities meet for the first time, it is not only their lives that shift. Those around them feel it too. Energy renews. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes not. Always for the new.
Vincent widened his eyes and took it in: the lighter shade of black in the upper right corner of his vision, the way surrounding light now touched the edges of his face, the unfamiliar stars whose voices he had heard but never seen.
A sense of wonder filled his old heart. Something stirred inside him. It sounded like a triangle tapped lightly, like Tibetan bells ringing, like a finger drawn slowly across the surface of a gong. A deep, peaceful awareness of life, and his aliveness.
Vivienne yawned, long and breathy, and opened her eyes as a NASA sped past her head. She blinked once. Then again.
And in that second blink, she became aware of two eyes she had never seen before.
They were looking back at her.
She blinked again.
Vincent wanted to speak, but instead, he blinked too. Four blinking eyes, fanning something into flame. A steady fire.
From that moment until now, Vincent and Vivienne hang on opposite ends of the sky. They do not speak. They do not sing. They do not send notes on the backs of passing NASAs.
They hang, separately, gently, precariously, held by invisible strings attached to all corners of the universe.
And they blink.
And open.
And blink.
And open.
They cannot move toward one another. They will never touch the surface of each other’s being. Even so, they remain connected, by the turning of Vincent’s perspective, and by the quiet recognition that passed between them.
Iris Lennox 