“Interstellar I Am Yours”

Sometimes, when I see him, I am not violently transported back to the worst of it, back to blood and bruise and bone, but instead to the first time he said Hi, baby, and I looked at the line of him leaning against my locker and felt so small and distant. A planet in orbit. The way he smiled at me like the sun coming up, Hi, baby, so that each time I am confronted with his image again it feels inevitable; the turning of the earth, the unspooling of nebulas, the time and space between first and last crumbling into flashes of orange light and copper, so bright sometimes that I glimpse at our futures, inextricably intertwined: Hi, baby, such a fine greeting; such a fine goodbye. The sad twinge it might take on should he one day say it with a knife to my throat, my hair falling over the meeting of metal and flesh like a dark column of water.

Now I am grown. Now my parents don’t call me baby. Now I ask the people who bend me over to say meaner things. Now even my sister shortens her giddy affection to a twenty-something’s would-be palette. But ‘now’ is not yet and un-now and already happened. If he is the sun rising, if I am a planet in orbit, if he is still searching for me across galaxies, then we are beings-out-of-time. The starlight we see here is cold and empty in space, a billion years away. And he, a celestial body, traverses the speed of time until I am, again and always, fifteen, staring at his lips as they form those words, a bloody kaleidoscope of infinite Hi, baby.

Was I not fearfully and wonderfully distilled to dust by him? Scattered across our years together, so that I can remember his smile as well as his snarl; the Vonnegut book he held in hand like the trophy he used to bash my head in; the time I painted his toenails before he used that same shellacked foot to grind my face into the carpet. But what is a planet supposed to do when a man steps upon you and says, violently, This is mine? When his mark was impaled through my body, when he planted that bruising flag, when he left but threatened, forever, to come back and reclaim me—what could I do but call softly into that dark, cold space I am yours, I am yours, I am yours. Until it echoed across time and distance. Until we could hear it, bouncing against our lockers, so that his mouth might pause (Do we have a problem, Houston?) before eventually moving to Hi, baby.

Even so. When he got me on the ground that first time, when he knocked me out, when he unveiled my naked flesh and smeared my blood, when I woke and lived the moment to which I am constantly dragged back, when I learned what the rest of our existence together would be like, I can’t help but wonder if he stood over my unmoving body and (for an instant) thought what an astronaut once said of the Earth: This view is my glimpse of divinity.

Megan Williams is a creative writing student based in Pittsburgh. She loves reality television, Russian fairytales, and revenge stories. Most recently, her work appears in 580Split, ellipsis…literature & art, and Inlandia.