But.
Once they met, the rest of it, the love between them, was inevitable.
I’M NOT GOING TO LET this thing with Daniel stop me from going to the museum. This is one of my favorite areas of the city. The buildings here aren’t quite as tall as those in Midtown. It’s nice being able to see patches of uninterrupted sky.
Ten minutes later, I’m in the museum in my favorite section—the Hall of Meteorites. Most people head right through this room to the gemstone one next door, with its flashy precious and semiprecious rocks. But I like this one. I like how dark and cool and spare it is. I like that there’s hardly ever anyone here.
All around the room, vertical cases with shining spotlights display small sections of meteorites. The cases have names like Jewels from Space, Building Planets, and Origins of the Solar System.
I head right over to my favorite of all the meteorites—Ahnighito. It’s actually just a section of the much larger Cape New York meteor. Ahnighito is thirty-four tons of iron and is the largest meteorite on display in any museum. I step up to the platform that it sits on and trail my hands across it. The surface is metal-cold and pockmarked from thousands of tiny impacts. I close my eyes, let my fingers dip in and out of the divots. It’s hard to believe that this hunk of iron is from outer space. Harder still to believe that it contains the origins of the solar system. This room is my church, and standing on this platform is my pillar. Touching this rock is the closest I ever come to believing in God.
This is where I would’ve taken Daniel. I would’ve told him to write poetry about space rocks and impact craters. The sheer number of actions and reactions it’s taken to form our solar system, our galaxy, our universe, is astonishing. The number of things that had to go exactly right is overwhelming.
Compared to that, what is falling in love? A series of small coincidences that we say means everything because we want to believe that our tiny lives matter on a galactic scale. But falling in love doesn’t even begin to compare to the formation of the universe.
It’s not even close.
“Symmetries”
A Poem by Daniel Jae Ho Bae
I will
stay on my
side. And you will
stay on an-
other
MY FATHER AND I WERE close once. In Jamaica, and even after we moved here, we were inseparable. Most times it felt like me and my dad—the Dreamers—against my mom and my brother—the Non-Dreamers.
He and I watched cricket together. I was his audience when he ran lines for auditions. When he was finally a famous Broadway actor, he would get me all the best parts for little girls, he’d say. I listened to his stories about how our life would be after he became famous. I listened long after my mom and brother had stopped listening.
Things started to change about four years ago, when I was thirteen. My mom got sick of living in a one-bedroom apartment. All her friends in Jamaica lived in their own houses. She got sick of my dad working in the same job for basically the same pay. She got sick of hearing what would happen when his ship came in. She never said anything to him, though, only to me.
You children too big to be sleeping in the living room now. You need you privacy.
I never going to have a real kitchen and a real fridge. Is time for him to give up that foolishness now.
And then he lost his job. I don’t know if he was fired or laid off. My mom said once that she thought he quit, but she couldn’t prove it.
On the day it happened he said: “Maybe is a blessing in disguise. Give me more time to pursue me acting.”
I don’t know who he was talking to, but no one responded.
Now that he wasn’t working, he said he would audition for roles. But he hardly ever did. There was always an excuse:
Me not right for that part.
Them not going to like me accent, man.
Me getting too old now. Acting is a young man game.
When my mom got home from work in the evening, my father told her he was trying. But my brother and I knew better.
I still remember the first time we saw him disappear into a play. Peter and I had walked home from school. We knew something strange was up because the front door was hanging open. Our father was in the living room—our bedroom. I don’t know if he didn’t hear us come in, but he didn’t react. He was holding a book in his hand. Later I realized it was actually a play—A Raisin in the Sun.
He was wearing a white button-up shirt and slacks and reciting the lines. I’m not sure why he was even holding the play because he already had it memorized. I still remember parts of the monologue. The character said something about seeing his future stretched out in front of him and how it—the future—was just a looming empty space.
When my father finally noticed us watching, he scolded us for sneaking up on him. At first I thought he was just embarrassed. No one likes being caught unawares. Later, though, I realized it was more than that. He was ashamed, as if we’d caught him cheating or stealing.
After that he and I didn’t do much of anything together anymore. He stopped watching cricket. He turned down all my offers to help him memorize lines. His side of my parents’ bedroom grew more cluttered with stacks of used and yellowed paperbacks of famous plays. He knew all the roles, not just the leads but the bit parts as well.
Eventually he stopped with all pretense of auditioning or looking for a job. My mom gave up the pretense that we’d ever own a house or even find an apartment with more than one bedroom. She took extra shifts at work to make ends meet. Last summer, I got a job at McDonald’s instead of volunteering at New York Methodist hospital like I used to.
It’s been over three years of this. We come home from school to find him locked in his bedroom, running lines with no one. His favorite parts are the long, dramatic monologues. He is Macbeth and Walter Lee Younger. He complains bitterly about this or that actor and his lack of skill. He heaps praise on those he judges to be good.