Spacewalk
By Laura Lantz
Most days Emily doesn't find it troubling, the sense of having no solid ground beneath her. Each person has their own private mythology—a set of unconscious fantasies that loop and remix below the drumbeat of day-to-day life—and hers has to do with the vast uncaring blankness of outer space.
She unbuckles her seatbelt, setting off a chiming alarm, and rotates and pulls the keys out of the ignition. The sun is still below the horizon but the sky is getting brighter; there will be enough ambient light to navigate the beach.
As she steps out of the car into the chill air, some part of her briefly imagines foot and pavement colliding and drifting away from one another. But no. She is walking to the curb, and onto the sidewalk, around the playground and past the rec center, and it seems incredible to traverse distance in this way—to shift rhythmically and seamlessly through countless unstable poses and in doing so, progress out towards the sand.
Her mind is spinning.
How the hell do other people do it? How does anyone do it?
Other people: each the sovereign center of their own universe. Coherence, critical mass, breathable atmosphere. Natural equilibrium. The self-evident solidity of things, the road rising up to meet them. Castles built in the air, now resting on foundations built underneath. Lungfuls of oxygen gathered and released, shaped, forcefully expelled—as sighs, as shouts, as karaoke into a microphone.
Emily: yanked free and untethered from herself long ago, made selfless before she had a chance to develop a sense of self. Rootless, groundless, hollowed-out. Perpetually pulled off balance by other people's gravity, desperately flailing across pools and puddles of infinite empty sucking void that open up alarmingly in the midst of a normal day, without warning. Event horizons, escape velocity. Airlocks. Radio signals. (Ping—is anyone out there? Ping—can anyone hear me?)
How could she have ever expected to hold her own without devoting her life to the effort? She knew what would happen. She knew what she was doing when she did it, the choice she was making. To let herself be drawn in. To explore another person's world—a wonderland, bursting with color and life—and imagine that she could linger. Grow comfortable. Make a home there, without there being a price to pay.
The pull of local gravity, reorienting cells, bones, an entire life.
What kind of life is it, to live as a stowaway on another person's world without a world of your own? Body starving for the nutrients of fruits bathed in the dew of another atmosphere, vegetables pulled from the soil of a planet that failed to ever take shape.
She keeps trying to find her way to a place that doesn't exist. Like trying to form a snowball out of powder, particles falling away from one another—scattered, adding up to nothing. Unreal.
Her foot touches sand, and as the sand shifts but doesn't give way, suddenly she has weight; is pulled out of her thoughts and back into her body, making her way from the car toward the sea. The rhythm of her walking breaks, alters to incorporate the sliding of her feet, the effort to push off against a surface that yields slightly to contact. Each step becomes a call and response, a more nuanced conversation that requires her attention.
She negotiates her way across the stretch of open sand, past the line of debris, pausing before the boundary where dry and wet sand meet. Maneuvers out of her shoes, her outer layers of clothing. Unencumbered, continues her trajectory.
And then: a bright wavering line, where the edge of the water meets her skin. She keeps moving forward and it travels up her body, tracing her toes, her ankles, her shins… the contours of the backs of her knees, the surfaces of her thighs. Meeting and rippling out from the core of her body. Outlining her hips… her belly… the base of her ribs, her chest. Her shoulders. Her throat.
The cold of the water is seizing her lungs. With an effort, she remembers how to breathe, keeps re-remembering how to breathe, and as she does, something in Emily's chest realigns, just for a moment.
Moment to moment to moment; a heartbeat.
Coalescing, like iron magnetizing or a wave cresting to spill onto the shore. Merging into the ocean as it pulls itself to itself, able to hold any number of seeming contradictions.
She emerges from the cold water into the colder sensations of moving air. Keeps breathing; breath in, breath out, repeat, repeat. Hurries across the wet sand, gathers her things into her arms. She treads and staggers her way up the soft slope to the car, every inch of skin tingling with life, and the sand sticks to the soles of her feet as she goes.
THE END
Author Bio: Laura Lantz lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her work explores embodied cognition and emotion, the dynamics of complex interconnected systems, and the creation of personal meaning.