Between Pebbles and Perseids
EMILY JAY
After my breakup, I wanted the opposite of Kelson. He was my first kiss and my first boyfriend because he asked girls out until they said no, which I hadn’t learned to say. He had two years and two inches on me but didn’t learn the baby-making process until 18. We spent late nights making out while he lectured me on conservative assertions over a condescending smile. I listened politely till the night he said, “I can’t imagine my life without you.” That night, I learned to say no.
So I was living, boyfriendless, with my sister Jennette in West Jordan, Utah. The snow globe of the world: we have smartphones and booty shorts; otherwise, not much enters or leaves. We go to church and believe in forever love. We get married to the kid next door and try to make our 1970s ramblers look like farmhouses inside. We hang family pictures and “all because two people fell in love” signs in our front rooms until we get divorced and refill the frames. You can’t do anything more rebellious than color your hair without losing friends, but somehow, my car got stolen twice from that neighborhood.
Utah makes people think of the country. West Jordan is populated by country-hating country people. We’re considered a suburb of Salt Lake City, and we cling to that city-ness, even though an hour drive will take you to wildernesses still smirking at urbanization.
I worked in the deli at Macey’s grocery store. I was doing a few credits at Salt Lake Community College, where I didn’t have any friends because I never did, even though I’d forced myself to take social classes because I wanted to make friends. When I was at home, Jennie’s West Jordan rambler groaned under the weight of three grown adults and some seven-ish kids, plus what must have amounted to several pounds of nail polish and pasta sauce mashed into the carpet and left to harden. Those rock-hard carpet strands were the gravestones of Jennie’s nondomestic dreams. Still, neither she nor the house pitied themselves, and neither stood out from the rest of the street at all.
Jennie’s husband Colin intimidated me. He was a big man with a big voice and bigger opinions---one of those Gen-X-ers with a Boomer mentality who thinks there’s just one right way to do life. He believed that a man without a job might as well be dead, even though he was laid off in every corporate purge the early 2000s had to offer. But he loved his family and was good at apologizing.
Jennie wrote music and taught singing lessons. She was a free spirit with ADHD, a combination which made her hard to talk to even when she cared. I wanted to prove something to her, prove that my writing was an art just like her music. Prove I could write well enough to deserve attention. But I hardly wrote at all while I lived with her and Colin because my IQ dropped 20 points every time I walked into the house.
Colin told me once my biggest problem was I didn’t open up to people. I hadn’t opened up to him because I knew he wouldn’t like the real me: a soft-spoken 19-year-old pining for love. Love from someone who wasn’t Kelson. Or Colin.
I was freshly home from closing the deli. It was 10 pm in summer, and I wasn’t tired because I’d slept in until 12:30, right through my 8 am English 2050 class. I vaguely intended to write a research paper for that class on the science behind a successful romantic comedy, but I couldn’t find any resources. There were only eight students, and one of them had asked me out with a note on my desk like we were ten-year-olds. I pretended not to see it. This plus the early hour made the class easy to skip. Regularly.
Jennie, Colin, and I had our usual post-bedtime conversation: Jennie looked at Facebook on her tablet and Colin looked at Facebook on his phone and Jennie asked me how my day was. I was saying something profound like, “My day was pretty good,” when Jennie interrupted me with, “Did you see on Facebook? The Perseids are peaking tonight.”
Jennie is experience-oriented, but only for experiences behind her. She always talks about how much fun she had in college: the date when she and the business major boy lay on the runway while the planes swept over them to land, or how the first time she ever said the f-word was the day she went skydiving, and it was on tape.
Personally, I don’t plan to go skydiving, but I told myself for a long time I would, because that’s the kind of thing West Jordaners think makes you interesting. I did try cliff jumping once and wasn’t a fan. I spent ten minutes working up to the leap. When I landed in the water it felt just like when I’d had my wisdom teeth pulled, and I was shaky all day afterward. It’s nice to brag that I did it. Otherwise, it wasn’t life-changing and it wasn’t fun. Maybe I did it wrong.
Jennie likes to talk about when her life was fun because now all she does is everything. She can’t stay up to watch the Perseids because she has four kids who need to be at school at 7:45 and 7:50 and 8:30 and another one who has afternoon preschool and a toddler who’s potty training and a baby who’s nursing and she has a PTA meeting after she drops lunch off for Colin because that’s five dollars they can put into savings. She also has to make at least seven social media posts about how much she loves her kids, even while she yells at them not to paint on the bottom of the kitchen table with homemade elderberry jam. As always, this night she would go to bed at 11 with Colin after eating nachos and watching an episode of a Marvel spinoff.
Meanwhile, I would be sucked into a YouTube wormhole, trying not to snack too much while lonely hours were eaten away. So she was right, I might as well watch the Perseids. At least it wasn’t cliff jumping.
“You should text Hayden and see if he wants to go with you,” Jennie suggested. Hayden was a senior in high school. The full feeling of our acquaintanceship was encapsulated in our most recent conversation: I had said, “Did you get a haircut?” and Hayden had said, “No.”
To Jennie, who was in a stage of life where awkwardness and intimacy no longer had any relevance, that must have sounded like the perfect recipe for instant Top Ramen-brand love: just add hot water and shooting stars.
“Maybe,” I told her, and felt oddly guilty, because maybe I would have liked to hang out with Hayden, but also maybe Hayden would grow up to be someone who answered the door in his bathrobe, in which case he definitely shouldn’t have been invited stargazing. Instead, I texted some college acquaintances who I knew would say no. Even so, when they texted back, I told them they were lame.
I looked at the dark map before I left, which shows where there’s less light pollution to ruin your view of the night sky. Utah has mountains to the east and a desert to the west: essentially, the dark map looked like the side of a black boot with a lightning-bolt-painted center.
I decided to head west. I turned up the radio so I couldn’t hear myself think and sped across I-80 until Adam Levine’s voice was fuzzier than razzmatazz. I-80’s official names are the Purple Heart Trail, Dwight D. Eisenhower Highway, and Lincoln Highway, but no one calls them any of those things. The road goes below the Great Salt Lake, past the Skull Valley Indian Reservation, and through a brief mountain pass before opening up into the Salt Flats.
The Salt Flats are a white-salt desert left behind when Lake Bonneville, the prehistoric sea which once covered most of Utah, piddled down to become the Great Salt Lake, about 12,000 years ago.
The Salt Flats are haunted by abandoned dreams. Possibly also by ghosts, because it was the decision to follow Hasting’s Pass through the Salt Flats that cost the Donner Party their cattle, wagons, and the days left before winter. Other pioneers crossing through the Salt Flats to California dropped housewares and even pianos here, having hauled them all the way across plains and deciding, in this desolate place, such luxuries weren’t worth the trouble.
Under the sun, the Salt Flats are a mirror. The Donner Party saw reflections of their own caravan walking alongside them and thought for a while they weren’t alone. You can still see this illusion in the early afternoon if you look out your window on some parts of I-80: there seems to be another road to the north, where your own car is driving.
There are other illusions: cars and trains and even the mountains seem to float above the ground in the distance, and the light makes the salt waver like the lake that once contained it. Likewise, the little that grows and the old, abandoned furniture always look like they’re dancing in the wind.
There are no houses because the ground is salty and waterless. After passing a yellow-grass rest stop just before the valley, there are no buildings until Wendover, Nevada, unless you count a military test site. Drivers usually do count it for something, and they drive I-80 how you’d expect when nuclear devices might be nearby.
But there were no illusions and hardly any cars that night when I slowed to a stop shortly east of the Salt Flats: I could see the land opening darkly west of me into their emptiness, but I stayed where the mountains were north and south of me, their comforting containment recognizable only by the fracture they caused in a star-cumbered sky.
I parked on the shoulder of I-80, which was barely wide enough to fit my car. There was no cell phone reception, no streetlamps beaming down on that still darkness, just the road decorated with occasional for-display-only speed limit signs, surrounded by a white sea like summer snow in the moonlight.
It was midnight. I had a book to read---something droll and respectable by C.S. Lewis, which I finished six months later and didn’t understand at all. I also brought my journal, into which I sporadically wept my darkest thoughts, but generally forgot I owned, now that my brother Jeremy couldn’t steal it and post its contents on Facebook. I lied to myself that such literary entertainment would hold my interest while I waited for stars to move. I ended up leaving both books in the car all night.
I have an allergy to mosquito bites and nowhere is safe, so I sprayed myself down with enough mosquito spray to fumigate a farmer’s field. One of my favorite things about being alone was not needing to use the nice, lemony-smelling bug sprays that don’t work, because alone, no one cared if I made the whole car smell like DEET for a week. DEET wards off boys as effectively as it does mosquitos.
Now an aerosol mosquito fortress, I was just opening the car door with my coat halfway up my arms when a 30-foot semi-truck sped past at 80 miles per hour, close enough to make the road rumble underneath me.
I climbed out the passenger door instead.
I shimmied up onto the car hood---still warm from the long drive---and used my coat as a blanket. I briefly allowed myself, despite the luxury of DEET, a wish that I wasn’t alone. Then I extensively convinced myself I was much happier alone: any company would just complain about being cold and convince me to drive back to West Jordan for gas station ice cream. I was too patient with the stars to be around other people. I was a Perseid predator, starved for something magical.
My experience with people was they tended to ruin magical moments, because they were either too busy being themselves to escape into fantasy, or too busy escaping into fantasy to remember they were still themselves. Keats said there’s a balance between the two: a space between beauty and truth, between knowing and accepting, a moment where they’re the same. But under that starlit sky, I didn’t know Keats yet, and I would’ve sold my soul to be pretty---as if the stars would have cared.
There: a falling star streaked playfully across the sky, like a lover waiting to be chased. Or was it playful? Perhaps it fell like a tear, elegant and graceful, as if from a swan’s eyes. It curved into the pull of the atmosphere, looking gentle and resigned. Of course, it vanished before I thought any of that. All I saw was a tiny moving light, and then its absence.
Another star fell, and another. They looked the way music would if it could really be taken down by the eyes, instead of represented by black dots. And I remembered they were really only pebbles burning up as they entered the atmosphere. How enviable, pebbles who die triumphantly in the sky, while our earth-bound pebbles sit graying in the dirt until they’re worn down to dust. Once, earth pebbles surely remember, they too were molten---part of a golden, primordial earth that shined brighter and farther across the universe than gravity-murdered space dust.
I remember it was hard to imagine those gentle, silent, falling lights were being violently ripped apart by the atmosphere.
Two stars fell and crossed each other’s paths, making a little ‘x’ in the sky, and I pointed to it, closing one eye to mark its location, because I knew there was treasure there, somewhere in the sky. Of course, since I was terrible with directions, and also never going to space, I immediately forgot where it was. But I marked it anyway. Those two asteroids reminded me of Romeo and Juliet. “Two star-crossed lovers.” Embracing in the light before fading away.
Of course, the falling stars didn’t actually touch each other. They could have been miles apart in the upper atmosphere. Sometimes I wish I could look at the sky without knowing anything about it, and just dream of what things could be, unhindered by the knowledge of what they really are.
I wished that about love, too. Love is something different when you’re in it. Another thing I enjoyed about being alone, out of a relationship and closed off: the freedom of imagining love without the insistent reminder of what I knew it would be for me---ignoring my future written in West Jordan’s stained-carpet tombstones. I’m not saying love’s expectation is better than its reality, or that we should value ignorance. Maybe we should value innocence. Because at every age, life grows a new innocence we dance around. For instance, my seventy-year-old father has forgotten how to be alone completely. He goes with my mom even to grab mayonnaise at the corner store. He is as innocent to isolation as I was to companionship.
Just as another shooting star fell, a semi, keeping at a steady 85 miles per hour, whooshed by in the lane two feet from my car and rocked it like a rowboat from the wind. My hair was blown into my face---I got goosebumps all over---it was as if that falling star had caused the whoosh.
I laughed what must be the prettiest, liveliest, and most feral laugh I will ever laugh, and I knew it, and I knew no one heard it, that no one fell in love with that perfect laugh, or even cared. I couldn’t resist the feeling of that little sadness, gulping after me even as I laughed. Then another semi passed and I laughed again, and I stared at the stars and felt younger than a child but much older than I am now. I was an innocent sinner, I was Adam and Eve---I was as much like a shooting star as anyone ever has been, the atmosphere diving out of my way and I, laughing as I crumbled to bits, crumbled in the way that makes you laugh because there’s nothing else to do about it.
I thought for a minute about how silly it was, that people stare up at the sky during meteor showers and focus all their attention on space pebbles when those unmoving stars, which hardly flicker, are the real mystery: near-immortal forges of every molecule with more than two working parts. No one watches the stars in a meteor shower, just the incineration of space refuse.
What I didn’t think about until years later is, by that reasoning, space refuse is made from the stars, too, and must have travelled just as far as the starlight to reach earth, only to be crushed by the ozone layer’s savage snuggles.
Another semi whizzed by me, and I considered it wasn’t just the semi whizzing by. There was a person in there, probably in their forties because somehow all semi drivers seem to be, who most likely wondered for a second or two why there was a piece of crap Honda parked on I-80’s shoulder; probably hoped no one would jump into the road but wasn’t worried enough to call the police or even brake their truck down to a cautious 75 miles per hour.
I’d been out for a few hours, still deep night, and I’d been alone long enough I was numb to it. I had no intention of leaving, ever. I wanted to stay, trapped in night, stars, a bug spray fortress, and loneliness that didn’t feel lonely anymore, with thoughts that seemed profound and new to me, but which I knew would seem stupid in the morning, the same way daylight and a little grounding would turn the Perseids into pebbles. Instead, for now, I thought how silly West Jordan seemed in contrast to all this dark nowhere---but even out here, the morning sun would make that tombstone-carpet future dance in front of me like the Salt Flat’s pianos.
Then I saw a light, far away to the north, slowly moving across the field.
I couldn’t imagine why anyone else would be out there, in that houseless, one-road, mountain-bound expanse. I still can’t.
I decided it was a military vehicle from the test site. Except that would have come from the South. So maybe it was someone on an ATV. At night. With a silent engine. Or perhaps one of the semi drivers had called the police, and someone was on their way to check on my car. Walking to me through a field instead of driving up to me on the highway, naturally.
It couldn’t have been a farmer because there were no farms. It could perhaps have been someone from the Skull Valley Reservation, but that would be an awfully long walk. Most plausibly, since the railroad passes close there, it was some switch worker leaving his post at two in the morning to walk toward a pedestrian death-trap highway, for some reason.
I began to wonder, so near the Salt Flats, if it might have been some sort of night-time illusion. Or a ghost, assuming ghosts were real.
Maybe it was a group of tweens who’d hiked out to watch the stars and laugh and drink. This seemed plausible and I thought about calling out.
Maybe it was even someone watching alone, like I was, someone so desperately lonely they didn’t feel it anymore, but who dreaded what came with not being alone---someone who felt very much like a star that had already fallen. And with that half a dream in my head, I pulled out my own flashlight, finger ready to turn it on, vigilantly focused on that light.
The light in the field got closer.
Maybe it was a night-traveling serial killer who wouldn’t mind taking advantage of a free ride and a 19-year-old alone.
So I jumped off the hood of my car, back through the passenger door, and drove back home, two and a half hours home, back to the soiled carpets and children I lived with that weren’t mine, back to a life that felt neither authentic nor much like a dream. Back to time passing and worrying about DEET smell.
I remember spending the night’s last minutes trembling from fear, excitement, and exhaustion for as long as I had after cliff jumping, but there was something special about it this time, something I wanted to feel again. I wept about the stars like a Romantic poet into my journal, along with all my thoughts about pebbles and stardust, then promptly forgot all of them. Daytime meant there was work to do and school to sleep through, and Jennie and Colin to fluster me: pebbles I would turn into boulders, not into stars.
But the light: the light I didn’t forget. I was bewildered by it---the absolute mystery of who could’ve been out there. I bounced between ideas constantly: a stowaway, a lost cowherd, an absurd desert farmer up at four in the morning to water thistles. And mostly I wondered if somehow it might have been my soul mate, out there in that field, wandering aimlessly under star-heavy skies with his own little light to match them. Wondered if maybe in my fear to leap I’d missed out on my last escape from Colin-Kelson love, my last shot at that impossible dream for something more authentic than reality.
And even in that doldrum daylight, when I told my story to Jennie and realized how silly it all really was, I left out that light. I kept it to myself as something sacred, as the most profound and frightening thought I had that night: the determined glint lost between pebbles and Perseids, a fallen star still wandering.
