The Sun Is Also a Star(41)

Next to her is Lachesis, older and more matronly than her sister. In her hands, she holds the rod used to measure the thread of life. The length and destiny of your child’s life is in her hands.

Finally we have Atropos—old, haggardly. Inevitable. In her hands she holds the terrible shears she’ll use to cut the thread of your child’s life. She determines the time and manner of his or her death.

Imagine the awesome and awful sight of these three sisters pressed together, presiding over his crib, determining his future.



In modern times, the sisters have largely disappeared from the collective consciousness, but the idea of Fate hasn’t. Why do we still believe? Does it make tragedy more bearable to believe that we ourselves had no hand in it, that we couldn’t have prevented it? It was always ever thus.

Things happen for a reason, says Natasha’s mother. What she means is Fate has a Reason and, though you may not know it, there’s a certain comfort in knowing that there’s a Plan.

Natasha is different. She believes in determinism—cause and effect. One action leads to another leads to another. Your actions determine your fate. In this way she’s not unlike Daniel’s dad.

Daniel lives in the nebulous space in between. Maybe he wasn’t meant to meet Natasha today. Maybe it was random chance after all.

But.

Once they met, the rest of it, the love between them, was inevitable.





I’M NOT GOING TO LET this thing with Daniel stop me from going to the museum. This is one of my favorite areas of the city. The buildings here aren’t quite as tall as those in Midtown. It’s nice being able to see patches of uninterrupted sky.

Ten minutes later, I’m in the museum in my favorite section—the Hall of Meteorites. Most people head right through this room to the gemstone one next door, with its flashy precious and semiprecious rocks. But I like this one. I like how dark and cool and spare it is. I like that there’s hardly ever anyone here.

All around the room, vertical cases with shining spotlights display small sections of meteorites. The cases have names like Jewels from Space, Building Planets, and Origins of the Solar System.

I head right over to my favorite of all the meteorites—Ahnighito. It’s actually just a section of the much larger Cape New York meteor. Ahnighito is thirty-four tons of iron and is the largest meteorite on display in any museum. I step up to the platform that it sits on and trail my hands across it. The surface is metal-cold and pockmarked from thousands of tiny impacts. I close my eyes, let my fingers dip in and out of the divots. It’s hard to believe that this hunk of iron is from outer space. Harder still to believe that it contains the origins of the solar system. This room is my church, and standing on this platform is my pillar. Touching this rock is the closest I ever come to believing in God.



This is where I would’ve taken Daniel. I would’ve told him to write poetry about space rocks and impact craters. The sheer number of actions and reactions it’s taken to form our solar system, our galaxy, our universe, is astonishing. The number of things that had to go exactly right is overwhelming.

Compared to that, what is falling in love? A series of small coincidences that we say means everything because we want to believe that our tiny lives matter on a galactic scale. But falling in love doesn’t even begin to compare to the formation of the universe.

It’s not even close.





“Symmetries”

A Poem by Daniel Jae Ho Bae

I will

stay on my

side. And you will

stay on an-

other





MY FATHER AND I WERE close once. In Jamaica, and even after we moved here, we were inseparable. Most times it felt like me and my dad—the Dreamers—against my mom and my brother—the Non-Dreamers.

He and I watched cricket together. I was his audience when he ran lines for auditions. When he was finally a famous Broadway actor, he would get me all the best parts for little girls, he’d say. I listened to his stories about how our life would be after he became famous. I listened long after my mom and brother had stopped listening.

Things started to change about four years ago, when I was thirteen. My mom got sick of living in a one-bedroom apartment. All her friends in Jamaica lived in their own houses. She got sick of my dad working in the same job for basically the same pay. She got sick of hearing what would happen when his ship came in. She never said anything to him, though, only to me.

You children too big to be sleeping in the living room now. You need you privacy.

I never going to have a real kitchen and a real fridge. Is time for him to give up that foolishness now.



And then he lost his job. I don’t know if he was fired or laid off. My mom said once that she thought he quit, but she couldn’t prove it.

On the day it happened he said: “Maybe is a blessing in disguise. Give me more time to pursue me acting.”

I don’t know who he was talking to, but no one responded.

Now that he wasn’t working, he said he would audition for roles. But he hardly ever did. There was always an excuse:

Me not right for that part.

Them not going to like me accent, man.

Me getting too old now. Acting is a young man game.

When my mom got home from work in the evening, my father told her he was trying. But my brother and I knew better.