envelop me

Conor Misson

FULL CIRCLE by Lisa Sammut

Capture me in abstraction,
undefined and ill at ease.
Orbiting my insecurity,
deep in soundless isolation
you hear me cry:

envelop me.

A biting chill; New York winter descends.

Jack attempts to light up the half-burnt blunt, both of us hoping we haven’t braved the exposure of the rooftop for nothing. Click-click-catch.

As roommates, we’re a good pairing. He’s more cerebral, and I’m dictated by emotion. I’ve never been the most open with men in my life—platonic or familial—but I think he sees that in me, accepts it. Jack isn’t demanding.

He turns back from the roof’s edge, inhaling as the tip of the charred rolling paper and weed glow in the dark. He passes it to me and I follow suit. It doesn’t take long to hit and my body relaxes and the cold is gone and it feels as though my entire self is unspooling.

I catch Jack looking up to the sky, squinting in the hope of catching a star. Here in Brooklyn, we’re far enough removed from the main island’s light pollution that he doesn’t have to work too hard. I join him. This is comfortable. Jack isn’t demanding.

‘Y’know space scares the shit out of me?’ I expose a concealed part of myself.

‘Oh, really?’ He could very easily laugh, or scoff. He does neither. Jack is not judgemental, even though I know he feels differently.

He’s an army brat who moved around a lot as a kid. He never told me that directly; I heard him relating to someone else with the same childhood about it. He’s a determined guy, a very smart guy, and I say he feels differently because I’m altogether confused, curious and awed by the world; he’s too focused and self-sufficient to succumb to the pitfalls of existential neuroses.

Bleary-eyed in the early mornings, I would watch as Jack taught himself to paint; sharp and nuanced portraits, dark and evocative tableaus.

Both of us being training actors, I once told him that I hoped to act the way Jeff Buckley sings. He was delighted by the concept and said he hoped to act the way Claude Monet paints.

With adequate resources, Jack would build a rocket ship using his own two hands and leave Earth’s orbit for as long as he could ration. Take a box of empty journals, observe, maybe see how far from home he could travel.

I tell him my fear of space comes not from what is known, but from what is unknown, and that what is unknown is actually conceivably endless, and that I can feel the space of it—not in the way I feel the roof below me, but in a way that I feel my stomach drop and head expand horizontally and my eyes widen and my brain backflipping at the pure incomprehension of what the fuck we are even doing here, wearing clothes? Building apartment blocks? Living thousands of miles from our families? Like, what is purpose? What is the purpose of purpose? Everything and nothing matter equally and unequally and sometimes both simultaneously.

Maybe I should just read more books about it.

It's a miracle this spiral doesn’t devolve into a panic attack.

‘Yeah. It’s pretty crazy.’ Jack inhales, stubs out the roach.

We sit there staring far out at the Manhattan skyline. Scaled down by the skies framing it, the city is more relatable from here. We don’t speak as we sit. Jack isn’t demanding.

Ten months later, the car is loaded with every possession I can fit under the airline weight limit, and I turn to say goodbye to Jack.

I don’t remember if we shook hands, or we hugged.

I leave with two months remaining on the lease, whole pieces of furniture unsold and assembled. But in his face, and his voice, none of that infringed.

No, that’s right. We did hug. But we didn’t say much, didn’t need to.

‘It’s been real, man.’

***

Stephen Hawking signed off his seminal text, A Brief History of Time, with the hope that one day, we would not only find the meaning underpinning our cosmic existence, but that it would be accessible and understood by all­—not just by scientists.

He wrote that ‘if we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God’ (210).

But in religious historian Reza Aslan’s God: A Human History, it’s proposed that the concept of God spun out of cavemen—deep in forests, without language as a tool—seeing knots in trees that abstractly resembled a human face, or saw a bird flying through the sky, and anointing those oddities that belied definition and prompted an indescribable dread with the title and reverence of God.

I’ve now read more books.

It isn’t helping.

***

I lay in bed with Annie, her body draping across mine.

I often wonder if you can ever know someone, truly, without ever sharing a pillow with them. So much is said, so much whispered, in the intimate enclosure of a bedroom. A world away from our own; a romantic unreality.

The fairy lights I’ve strung up along the wall cast a starry glow over us. In the bristling bluntness of London, I’ve found someone to be soft with. To be tender with.

In this world away from that one, I have unintentionally opened myself up wholly, been swallowed by this person and been grateful for it.

She is clinging to me and shivering. It’s warm in here so I’m not sure why.

‘I’m cold-blooded. I run cold,’ she says.

‘Like a lizard,’ I say.

‘And you’re my rock.’

Pillow-top poetry.

Two weeks later, Annie flies home to Perth.

Two weeks after that, the world locks itself away from a global pandemic.

In four months, we will never speak again. A reverse-engineered stranger.

As I prepare for my own flight home, I begin to pack down the décor of my bedroom. I detach the fairy lights from the removable plastic hooks I had stuck to the wall.

The lights had burned so long, and so often that there were now heat marks tracing where they had been.

***

American playwright Lanford Wilson had a proclivity for astrological metaphor.

In The Great Nebula in Orion, two women reconnect after many years where a description of the Orion constellation mirrors the distance and attraction between them. Home Free! opens with a young man frantically, anxiously lecturing imagined characters on the growing distance between the Seven Sisters as he awaits the return of his sister—who he has impregnated. In Sympathetic Magic, there is a breakthrough astrological discovery that calls to question the heart of humanity and art as the lives of its characters begin to spin into chaos.

Why Lanford would return to these ideas and images is something I will never know. I do wish I could ask him.

He was a queer artist, a child of divorce, raised largely by his mother, rebuilding a relationship with his father later in life—depicted in his mostly autobiographical Lemon Sky. Lanford lived and worked in New York City through the AIDS epidemic, helping to pioneer the Off-Off-Broadway scene. He knew alienation, he knew grief, he knew connection and artistic community.

His catalogue, defined by its challenging ciphers and offbeat rhythms, is an ode to those he loved and lost and wishes he understood better.

But did his work’s uniqueness reflect a hidden sensation of feeling adrift in an unending universe? Did his familiarity with loss stoke a desire to reach through the unknown to touch, once again, those he could no longer?

I’m overthinking it.

In Lanford’s Fifth of July he wrote:

‘After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realized that there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.’ (74)

A peaceful passage.

I wish people performed his work more often.

***

Now I want you all to move.

It’s movement class. The directive computes.

Stay soft, really luxuriate in each stretch, each step.

A long string of fairy lights skirts the perimeter of the room; leftover decorations from the studio Christmas party.

Just be where you are right now. There are no expectations. It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright.

The mirror-lined studio has never felt so warm, and my peers have never felt so close. There is usually more darkness to hide in.

If you come into contact with someone, let there be no expectations. Let them happen to you. And if the contact comes to a close, and you move on from one another, it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright.

I slalom and slink through the space; arms curling and unravelling, dispelling anxious tension out the tips of my fingers. While my body melts—as ordered—there comes a sense of buzzing clarity. Not in my mind, but my body.

Feeling often has a head start on conscious comprehension. The lag here is considerable, and this rising leviathan is utterly consuming.

Whatever is coming up, remember it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright, and just keep moving through the space.

My feet are frozen in place. I am in the throes of something gargantuan. My spine begins to roll; I feel the energy tipping towards the crown of my skull and an uninhibited sob pours out.

I don’t know what my body is exorcising. It isn’t sadness. I am not fighting it. There’s a comfort in it. I let it envelop me.

Peter, a friend and classmate, enters my space. He is wholly aware of me; his movement is not abstract, it is definite and purposeful.

His feet plant before mine, arms raising in a cautious and inquisitive gesture.

He embraces me.

I collapse into him.

Through a wormhole, a rush of memory.

Peter the humble poet, performer, artist. Freestyling in his Bushwick basement, clothes discarded, sweat dripping, aura pulsating under the glow of the neon strip lighting.

My head knocks back and forth with the music, laughing in disbelief at his wit and lyricism. I wish I was filming this, but I’m content to be present.

He empties the tank as the throng dissipates, his stamina giving way before his ability to string a rhyme together.

He takes some breaths; people ascend to join with the others but he comes over to me.

‘Thank you, man. You really kept me going up there.’

In four and a half years, we will meet again in Italy for our friends’ wedding. I have strep throat from too much drinking the night before, so I cannot tell him how happy I am to see him.

He teaches now. Still makes music. In fact, he’s finishing an album.

‘I’d love to send it to you, get your thoughts.’

He doesn’t, but the gesture is touching.

He lives with his partner in the home that they own. They are both people who love people, and when I’m told they have tenants that share the space with them, that makes me smile.

Back in the movement studio, Peter gently releases me. Steps back. Sees me.

Wherever you are right now is the perfect place to begin.

In the contact between us, my mind has caught up to my body. The feeling has clarified and revealed itself; I know what it is now.

Our bodies know much more than we do.

I’m going to drop in a word, and I’d like you to come into contact with what that word means to you.

Peter lets himself be swept across the room by his own impulses; away to another, or by himself—I don’t recall.

The word is ‘gratitude.’

***

Do planets have feelings?

If so, how are Pluto’s?

Now a dwarf planet—not fully qualified—this frozen mound clings to the Milky Way clique, not even knowing it has been shunned.

Or perhaps it never was a part of it.

Perhaps all of these worlds are perfectly unacquainted, and the universe really is as clinical as the scientists treat it.

Their dance around our Sun is just a happenstance of physics, and these celestial bodies couldn’t know gratitude, or us.

I read that in space, there is no empty space. It is entirely matter.

That was the part that had terrified me the most: everything endlessly untethered.

I don’t fear space as much anymore. Probably because I don’t think about it much anymore.

Earthbound matters are matter enough.

Traversing this celestial terrarium,
plodding feet shall return me to the one.
Warm encounters in a cold cosmos,
pull me in, by the hearth of your sun
where I whisper:

envelop me.