Associations

"Can you mute it? Or at least turn down the volume a bit?"

An arc of fire leaps out from the screen, searing space in all directions. Magnetic poles twisted to the point of its eleven-year reversal, the sun unleashes laughably large bursts of energy in the form of flares whipping out half a million kilometers past the surface.

Finger frozen on what she thought was the Volume button, she adjusts her position toward the TV, and takes in the whole incomprehensible scene. Distracted now worse than before, I almost ask her to switch back to the innocuous drivel on the last channel, but think better of it and adjust my own position to accommodate her and the quarks flashing onscreen.

She sighs. "Can you see?"

I look under her armpit, but the view is slightly blocked, so I settle deeper into the couch with her and watch over her shoulder, occasionally kissing cheek or neck. Moved by the deep-space images of a binary star system, we push and pull, rising and falling with our own orbits of interest.

"This is amazing!" she cries, eyelids flickering.

"I know!" I agree, running the gamut of significance.

Space exploration is still in its infancy, the narrator reminds viewers, but astronomers have increasingly cool gadgets to study the outer reaches of the tiny little fragment of space we can access.

She giggles and presses back, fingers dancing along mine, encouraging and teaching, guiding her own experience with her own imagery with her own narrative. I'm her passenger. If I'm the rocket, she's the liquid fuel and the fire, the chemical reaction that unleashes energy from matter, the plasmic brilliance under the delivery vehicle.

A splash of color represents the unfathomable geography of an interstellar cloud, the placenta of a star. The screen shows a gathering of particles, the slow accumulation of mass, the massive overload and nuclear fusion of hydrogen, the growth from intense white dwarf to sage old red giant, the fusion of a heavy iron core, the inability to support its own mass, and the inevitable collapse.

The screen explodes in supernova splendor, sending its photons intensely, momentarily to the far corners of the room. We're both caught in the heady glow of the star's dazzling death knell, pulled into the transmutation of a black hole, a point of infinitely concentrated mass that's collapsed into itself, consuming and silencing itself, greedily converting the neighboring light and space and time into an other-dimensionly unknown.

The turn of a cosmic hourglass.