Lou Reed played on the stereo and she took a sip from a plastic cup. She wore a blue jumper with a blue badge on in the shape of an anchor and her eyes glimmered, framed by the sparkling eye shadow she’d applied so vigorously. She wanted to impress people at the party, to catch someone’s attention, even to enter someone’s orbit. She took another sip. The cheap wine touched the back of her throat and she winced, glitter falling from her upper face and skimming her cheeks. “Satellite of loOOve,” crooned Lou.
Space, they called her, because of her white-blonde hair and air of mystery. She shone like a burning ball of gas through the plateau of the universe. Her silver locks in torrents like rivers of lightning, energy strapped down by blue ribbons. She was electric, but, like a fire bound by glass, she fell beyond reach.
She’d come alone to the party. She’d overheard people talking about it at school and decided, perhaps, that she was to be bold and attend. It was likely she’d wanted to see Jim Rockit. It was common knowledge that she’d harboured affection for him for about four years now, watching him incessantly in the hallways, or glimpsing him on excursions with Nina Astral in his automobile – his vessel for making and breaking love.
It was also common knowledge that things with her family weren’t soaring. Her mother was a very poor woman, broken by the economic downturn, and frozen in a vacuum of bitterness. This resentment would often leak from the ice-block of her mother’s rage under the feet of Space, causing her to slip and slide and have her silver hair ripped by talons of fury. The house, then, rotated on an axis, once in a blue moon basking in golden light of prosperity, mostly eclipsed by darkness.
“You’re a waste!” her mother would scream, rubbing her own withered legs. “You’re going the same way as that Bobby! You’ll be dead before you know it,” acid clinging to the nebula of every word.
Robert Jones was a boy who existed outside of the orbit of those in the town, too. He had attempted to end his life on three occasions, unsuccessfully, and so had continued to exist. To many, if not all, he was a waste of space. And he knew it. But he liked to think that Space knew him, with their intermittent eye contact and occasional Hello’s.
They both lived in a town that was pale. When winter grasped the houses within its pastel, spindly hands, their roofs cried into the gutters and then froze and expanded. The others in the town saw this transformation as ghastly. They stood at their vast windows and surveyed the bleak land with disgust, wrinkling their polished noses before venturing downstairs to drink orange juice from clean spherical glasses.
Space stood at her window and put her hands on her glass. Ten pink ovals, extra-terrestrial on the transparent canvas. The walls of her room, visible behind her, were the relics of her world. Blue paint thrown with frustration over vicious black. She was mesmorising.
But she existed within a black hole. It was easy to see for those that looked closely enough – those who had loved her for what felt like a millennia and those that despaired through her sorrow.
That night as satellites of love fell, and Jim Rockit professed Nina Astral as his star, and those soulless people in that solar system remained in their alignment, Space left. She ran. She flew. The majority of attendees hadn’t even realised that she’d been at the party, let alone vanished, consumed entirely by her urge to flee. It was said that when the police arrived inquiring over the missing person, many of those in the crowd, including Jim Rockit, shook their heads in puzzlement. “What a waste,” they would later say when she never returned.
To me, though, Space had been my everything. The infinity of her vacant, black eyes had overwhelmed me in a way that had made me euphoric. She had brought me back from the clutches of death with single glances from spheres framed by shimmering eye shadow. She had brought colour to the pastel world within which I lived. I did not feel sad when I realised she was gone for good. I, after all, had followed her that night to make sure she was alright and the winter’s night had not glazed over her with frost or with melancholy. I saw her approach the blue bridge that stood above the viscous lake that separated our town from the next, and I knew that she would be okay. I, too, had been caressed by the constellation of the water. I remember looking up into the night’s sky and seeing a shooting star, dancing carelessly across the black, like flames searing through the universe. And in that moment, I flew, too.