SPACE RACE

A city being built up, Whistle, looks a lot like a city being torn down—scaffolding and buckets, brick-sewn seams, dust clouds speckling the air. I’m planting a garden of all native species, but even it begins to feel like a zoo, a private parade of favored specimens. The rare pomegranate looks like the common carnation. Purple martins in fancy houses live with parasitic sparrows in their midst. It’s the cost of doing business, because chasing them away takes all day. The days, Whistle, as someday you’ll no doubt find out, are often tedious, circular corridors punctuated by doors opening onto small rushes of pleasure or pain, but in the end endless feeling, which is both a comfort and a source of despair, and either way an illusion we can’t help but believe and know to be false at the very same time. So it’s hard, Whistle, to keep the important questions in mind. A near miss reminds us: pulses drumming in our ears, tingling in every finger. What am I doing with my one little chance to be alive? my friend now distant sings through the car stereo I’ve put on because I miss her. Whistle, today they say the ocean will be empty in a future not too distant to imagine. There is a balancing act you will one day be introduced to and then never be free to unlearn, between the concerns of the day and the concerns of what we call the bigger picture. A friend of my friend who was paralyzed in a crash devotes herself to the cause of raising awareness about the small hard or even semisoft objects of daily use that can become deadly projectiles under the right conditions and I have no doubt she is correct, she is in fact expert, she is all the proof she needs, but who among us can bring ourselves to batten down every small thing to some not even invented yet small hatch like an astronaut patiently securing his rounded utensils in the womb of a capsule hurtling through space? We have no choice but to pick and choose, Whistle, yet this same equation is what will open our eyes to a lifeless ocean in fifty years, maybe sooner, according to today’s news we can’t bear to read. Instead we take quizzes about our personalities and our character traits, such as which marine animal are you?