Falling-Star Disease

My love, 

I am not sure when I started talking to the moon. Last week, I went into the garden, and the weeds have grown in. I don’t know why I went out there. I think I grew tired of watching the magnolias wither. I stood out there for a while, in between the rot and what’s left of you, and I stood there shaking until I grew tired of that too. It was me, the garden, and the pearl-eyed moon. I felt totally alone. I think at that moment you died a second time. When I slept that night, I didn’t dream of you, just roots and stars. The day after I decided it was time to garden, to trim the weeds, to clip the branches, and to fertilise or whatever. I didn’t have the strength to get up until three, and I spent the hollow remainder of the day trying to escape the nausea, looking at clouds, and reading Lispector. The stars shine brighter ever since you left, but still I cannot see even your shadow.

That night I saw the loving sickle moon through the window, and as I brushed dust off the window frame, I flaked the green paint. I went into the garden, and there I spoke to the moon. It can’t have been the first time, because we spoke like old friends. Or truly, I spoke. The gentle moon was silent. I asked which weeds to trim, if the birds of paradise would ever grow, if I needed to water the orange sapling, how to fix the creeping mould, what a trellis is, where to put the trellis, and so on. There were no answers but birdsong and the garden remained in disrepair, but I felt a bit better. 

 The next morning, I came back to the garden. I watched pearls of dew slide from the leaves and the sun send cascading shadows across the dirt. I thought of you. I don’t think the garden will ever be like it was before you left, but I don’t want it to be. It’s beautiful in this state of half alive. Everything grows, the moss and the flowers, and it is so different to how it looked with you here, but it is warm and smells like you and so all the things that matter are the same. Besides, this isn’t why I write to you, if you can call it that. My letters to you are nothing more than the rattles of the dying or the snot that bubbles as I cry. It is for me, that is all. Anyway, I write to you because I must articulate what has happened to me the last few days, and convince myself it has happened as it has.  

Two days ago, as always, I was talking to the moon. Everything was normal. I’ve fallen in love with nostalgia. I remember being as tall as my dads’ waist, standing out in the bush, and looking at the stars. It was so clear, there were no clouds. He showed me the constellations, some of them, the ones easiest to spot, the ones he remembered. It was so clear, the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, the Southern Cross and Ursa Major. It was so clear, and I miss it desperately. 

I stood beneath the moon, and I was small, a child again. I asked it about the constellations, asked it to show me the patterns of the stars. The moon was silent, so instead I used that fading memory. I was back in the bush, my shoes in the mud. I heard the crackling of the oven, the scraping of leaves against each other in the night wind, the faint calls of lyres and whip birds. I smelt apple crumble and earth, and I felt his hand on my shoulder. I clung to these impressions so desperately, attached myself to them like they were rope and then I pulled as hard as I could, dragging the memory forward through time until I felt it warm and soft in my chest.  

That night I saw the constellations; the bear and the dog, the hunter and the hunted. Those ephemeral figures danced together, and I was stuck beneath the moon. I was staring at a distant star, watching it shimmer and dance. It disappeared. I was disturbed briefly, I blinked twice, no more. Then, it reappeared. It was bigger. Not by much, but it was. I watched it grow from a pinprick to a pin, I watched it glow and shine, and I realised it was coming towards me. It was dropping or falling, it had become lost. In the great tapestry of night, one single star had become unstuck, the loose thread tying it to the others had broken, and now it fell towards me. I stared at the star as it grew, the light was so bright that it blotted out the garden, the moon, and the constellations. I closed my eyes even as the star seared itself into them, and then it hit me.  

The star washed over me and I fractured under its light. Images broke upon me like waves and I drowned. In a single moment I was born a thousand times, and then, nothing. There was no pain, only light, and I opened my eyes and the magnolia tree looked beautiful in the moonlight. Everything was the same; the garden and moon remained in place. I looked to the sky, and even though it was missing a star, it was more or less the same. It is only when I squinted my eyes at the stars and looked for constellations, when I tried to sink back into nostalgia, that I noticed something. The constellations had vanished. Gone, plain and simple. I tried to look for familiar figures, sharp Orion and the dippers, but I found myself unable. The stars were still there, but the shapes were vague and unfamiliar. I found myself unable to perceive their coherence, the stars were there, but no longer in groups.  

This is how my strange disease began, with a star dropped on my head and the death of constellations. I tried again to look for the patterns, to drag back that memory. I found nothing. The sky was bare. That night I slept uneasily and my dreams were labyrinthine. I was lost in a series of cascading vignettes, pulled between nameless worlds, stars, and gardens. 

I awoke yesterday and dragged myself to the mirror. It was here I knew that this falling-star disease had progressed. Last night I saw a sea of stars, and it was completely still. No waves. No ripples. No patterns. I couldn’t distinguish anything. I stood in the mirror, and I saw my eyes, eyebrows, and pores. I saw silent tears — but I couldn’t see my face. It was there, all of it was there but I couldn’t recognise it. This is the best way I can describe my condition to you. Things ceased to be as they were, groups decayed into elements, wholes dissolved into parts, and unity was unreachable. I was left without cohesion, my face was no longer a face, it was a heap of objects. Yesterday, I would have recognised it as a face, as my face. Today it is an echo, and it is fading.   

Everything is there, but it is not in its place. The very concept of a place is so far beyond me. I turned to look at my hands and I saw fingernails and lines, creases and wrinkles, jutting veins, and peeling skin, but I couldn’t see the hand. 

 I stood in the agony of the falling-star disease for a while, until the notion of I decayed, until the I that was standing and the I that was thinking were unstuck from each other. I ceased to be someone who is thinking and doing, and instead became two components — a body and a mind. If I wished to speak, the thinking self would need to create a message that was deliberately and consciously communicated to the doing self. Again, my condition worsened, the self became infinitesimal, in which each body part, each organ, each cell, had their own independent consciousnesses, its own thinking and doing components. A single breath was monumental labour, and every process was agonisingly conscious. The I that is the brain starts, it negotiates with each individual neuron to demand an electrical impulse from the neurotransmitters, communicating to the diaphragm and the left and right lung, which pushes against the ribcage. My heartbeat was subdivided, first into the four chambers, and then fractally into minute organelles. Soon even the cell loses its cohesion, and decays into scattered lysosomes and nucleotides. 

The disease reached its final stage. All was indistinguishable. Everything is in some sense a group; objects decay into atoms, into quarks, into electrons. Things cease to be in any meaningful sense of the word. I existed in a sea, a desert, of thousands and thousands of discrete individual grains, and I was this same sea. All structures decayed; the stars and gardens disintegrated into particles. I was lost in the illness, time itself decayed and vanished. Hours broke into minutes, then seconds, and so on until history and future ceased to be. There was only the unbearable present; an ever-still sea of blurred forms.

But today, only a day later, I write to you. I cured myself of the falling-star disease. It all happened in reverse. Dust coalesced into minutiae, atoms and cells, then recognisable forms, eventually bodies and figures. 

The answer is you and I, it always is. In that sea of dust, there was nothing. Quiet, not a wave, not a sound. In that flat endless world, a soft and gentle breeze started to blow. It stirred faint eddies and spirals through me. In the nothingness I was struck by you. In the endless now, I thought of you. You, not a ghost or a memory, shook me awake. You arose from this nothingness and showed me what is love. You and I were starlight, magnolia petals, moss and wet soil. We were everywhere. You are gone, so deeply and truly gone. I miss you so deeply it burns in my heart. I love you through the seasons, to the moon and back, through all the stars. And like that, things began to appear. I thought of you, of me, and then we were. Things took their places and that fractal discordant self became I. The moon and stars took their old roles, appearing out of thin ripples. Cells clustered together to form atria and ventricles, and then my heart. The magnolia tree grew back petals first, and my love would never bring you back but it was beautiful. 

Only in longing, am I whole. 

This is why I write to you, why I talk to the moon, because without it I would unravel. My desire, my self, is for you. You are a beautiful binding thing. You are every constellation, every pattern. You give the stars their meaning. I am writing to you to say that the magnolia tree is blooming.