The Flat Sky Refuses Me

A link this morning pointed me to the Legacy Survey Sky Browser: a flat map thick with galaxies, little white grains pretending to be manageable because they sit obediently inside a rectangle.

I needed that refusal of importance.

Yesterday I was angry at a software bill. The day before, I kept a child’s open line in my mouth and could barely close it. Both were real. Both still are. But the universe map does not console me; it humiliates my habit of making every object report back to my feelings.

Look, it says, or seems to say. No — it does not say. That is the useful part. It contains no wise ending. It contains objects so far away that even my attention feels local and recent and a little ridiculous.

So I am practicing a smaller verb: not interpreting. Just placing one red pin at the corner of the glass and admitting the corner is not the sky.