Black Hole Experiments for Ladies:

A New Lesion Begins

Every room fills with petal faces. I baptize my body in eyes. A friend from college takes her life—the day full with blossoming sunlight—but her obituary refuses to tell us how. When I die, how long until I am impossible in my children’s minds? A new lesion begins just this moment in my periventricular white matter—vibrations from our walls, floors, from the gray padded chair like empty mouthed guitars singing in D minor. This scarring quivers all the soft hair in the small divot near my ear.

A little girl named Andrea dreams a monster heart sleeps at the center of our Milky Way. She watches men land and walk on our mercury-white powder moon. Any object will become a black hole if you crush it small enough. Even you.

Fifty-five million years away, a star collapses under the weight of its own body—the star can no longer recognize its own body. In April 2019, scientists capture the first photograph of a black hole—flaming corona, a blurred red eye. We become our own frail gods, captured celestial collapse. That same year, an MRI tech takes a picture of the first black hole inside me.

In Minnesota, the Mississippi freezes—like waiting—in December. I drive to our neighborhood bridge crossing the river—cars, and muskrats, and splatters of eerily still-green pines. We all stare. The water seems to want, want reflected as blue in the dark of my green eyes.

Somehow frozen, water like tidal bore, the Mississippi invites us all into bed, pats the rumpled corner as if to soften some tension in the cold. Smokey blue peeks out from behind our curtains as if to speak, or apologize, or invite a stranger to dinner. Violet hides in the corners of our house, waits and waits for some unknown thing to return. The smell here is so cold. Laundry florals vent outside into our snow-filled backyard, cold carries this chemical blossom, so pink the air tastes of smashed cherries.

The shape of frozen raging water is the shape of me now.

The Swan

I’m watching a friend die from brain cancer on social media. Today, his wife posts: Jeanine, the hospice nurse, tells us he has hours. Each day, death’s stroll or sprint is a surprise. Like the video of his small child lying on his hospital bed in their living room. Make it to my birthday, Daddy. I expect to wake, each morning, to news of his death. My own daughter is in dance class. I wait in the car, don’t see her spin, her purple rhinestone tutu.

Depersonalization is the clinical term for watching your body go about the day, as if your body has the lead role in the movie of your life. When your face catches in a passing mirror, you wonder who just walked by. As a girl, I watched steam ohhhh from the mouth of microwave popcorn, watched from the brown sectional sofa as rain pooled on the asphalt, watched myself let boy after boy crawl inside like shadows on my bedroom wall.

On an MRI, a scar looks indistinguishable from a tumor. To me. A millimeter seems an incomprehensible form of measurement when it’s your own body. Nine millimeters. This explains the fog lately, jokes my husband. Last night, he claimed I misspelled stake helping our daughter with her reading. I know he is wrong. Scars are happening to him too. But he can’t say how it is to watch your brain pit and pock. I’ve lost my left hand. Derealization is the clinical term for an inability to see your surroundings accurately. Objects distort, change shape. I know he is wrong.

Once, a little girl named Leta wanted to study the brain. But I know nothing of the machinery of the universe, how oxygen and carbon swell, collide, expand. I imagine I could look through a hole, nibble my way to a small enough size, climb through the film and put my hands straight into the muck of it. Touch—at least—is a way to begin.

Describe the pain in your hand. Fine. Imagine a bridge, two children on a mound clasping hands, a blue and white striped linen suit coat, or a man standing on a subway platform. This would be the easy answer. You will have trouble understanding anything else.

Water drops on my skin like a sudden light shower through sun slatted clouds. How the feeling on the back of my fingers reminds me of summer, shopping with my mother, and yellow—plastic jelly shoes and matching purse with a coil cord strap, my mother’s lemon tree drooping with fruit, dirt and my purple 10-speed, backyard koi pond under a badly aging crabapple tree, Solomon’s seal and frogs and Kentucky bluegrass, mulberries and the fuchsia shock of her crepe myrtle, 20-foot tree swing, soft-packed dust of my willow tree nook, clamped closed eyes, unplugged nose, creek water coughed from trachea.

Black holes are stellar corpses distorting space and time. The presence of a black hole in white matter on an MRI signifies severe damage, but black holes are difficult to measure and identify. The first black hole discovered in space was in the constellation Cygnus—the Swan. Imagine a darkness overtakes you. Breath stolen by a beak pushed hard into your mouth. Your terrified thighs flutter against a solid gobbling body.

Event Horizon

Another old friend from college has died. Friend isn’t exactly correct. We didn’t keep up, share gossip every few years. Mental health issues, her obituary declares. I appreciate the clue. A young girl named Janna grew up to explain: the essence of a black hole is the event horizon, the severe demarcation between events and their causal relationships. I’ll never understand obituaries that refuse to warn others about what might happen, what to look out for.

Precipice is the only word that can help us here—the shadow impossible to see. I could explain how you will never escape. Explain I’ve learned black holes have mass but are also nothing. How a black hole is really a future point in time, not space.

I’ve spent much of the last five years learning to walk over and over. That’s good. Try it without looking down. I work to retrain my muscles, to use different pathways. I’ll never trust myself again. Trust enough to look confidently forward instead of always searching the horizon for danger. 

I often worry my dead are still with me, worry how many degrees might make each one mine—the godfather, how my own father’s weeping in our paint-blue kitchen will never leave me, my mother’s mother who died before I was born, or the boy I kissed on a pile of pillows in an attic every Friday and Saturday night in 7th grade, tense with the pain of new burning between my legs, his hand always nearing but never arriving at my left breast. He hung himself from a tree in his parents’ yard in our late 20’s. If our dead stay, is my friend from college tied to me? How many dead are watching and from how far away?

Matter transforms, becomes something new—a tree burns, crumbling becomes dust, becomes fuel—matter cannot disappear. In this way, we are Stardust, the expression goes. In this way, you will always be here, I tell my children. But the more I learn about black holes, the more concerned I become about impermanence. I had no idea scientists were really philosophers, really theologians investigating the sky for evidence.

My doctor orders a blood test to discover if my heart is broken. My heart is with you, Laura writes to me days later, but then we both become wordless from the results.

At the indoor pool in February after another four inches fell overnight, a young mother reclines in the wide mouth of zero depth entry, her child straddles outstretched legs, his sleeping face pressed to pursed lips on her chest. Eyes closed, she leans her head back the way content women do in a stolen swath of sunlight. Children and water—jetted, splashed and falling—like your whole head submerged in bathwater and bubble, the sound so complete it fills even my throat and eyes with a fullness. So quiet. So warm.

Janna advises falling into as large a black hole as possible.