Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2021-05-17 20:30:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | rosario ortiz |
WHO Rosario Ortiz
WHEN Monday, May 17, about 1am
WHERE Bushwick, Brooklyn
WHAT Stargazing
WARNINGS None
When Rosario was nine, her grandmother found her stretched out on the roof one clear April night, a thick winter coat bundled over her PJs, the stars reflected back in her eyes. Mami would have lost her mind. Just about any parent would, on discovering their elementary schooler had snuck out of bed in the middle of the night to court hypothermia. Rosario was already mounting a strident defence in her head: She wasn’t cold. That was why she had the coat, obviously; she wasn’t a baby. Mami would have been hustling her inside before she’d got past the first sentence. Abuela only clicked her tongue once and disappeared downstairs. Rosario was sure she was going to get it then. She mentally dug her heels in. I never left the apartment! The roof is part of the apartment, isn’t it? You never said I couldn’t go on the roof! And Camino was SNORING. But when her grandmother returned, it was not with Mami, but with a thick stack of blankets and a portable radio. She shook her head with fond amusement as she passed Rosario a couple of the blankets. “Just this once, m’ija.” And as Rosario stared, not daring to question it in case her grandmother thought better of it, as Abuela made a cocoon of the remaining blankets and settled herself down in the deckchair. Rosario drifted asleep that night to the dance of the stars and the crooning of Luis Segura singing that no sabia que una chica como tú a mí me iba a enloquecer. For her tenth birthday that year, Rosario got her first telescope. Abuela had scoured just about every pawn shop in Brooklyn to find it. The aperture was small and the tripod was rickety and the instruction manual was all in Japanese and the moment Rosario saw it her chest flooded with such intense emotion that she felt like she was going to burst. She has another telescope now, a decent five-inch reflector that she scrimped and saved for herself, but as practical and unsentimental as she considers herself to be, she can’t bring herself to part with the one her Abuela gave her. She looks at it and she feels an echo of the love she felt that day. It must have taken months for Abuela to wrangle it. Money was tight in their home – tighter still back then, before Rosario was working. She must have taken on extra hours. Probably bullied Dad into putting in. Rosario wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d passed a hat around the building. To say nothing of the amount of time she must have spent scouting out shops and haggling over prices. (Forty years in New York and Abuela still believes that price tags are a starting point for bargaining.) Rosario tries to hold onto that memory every time her grandmother does something to drive her crazy, which is at least three times a week on a good run. Her family would do anything for her. They’d bend over backwards. How could she ever think of doing less for them? She bombed the anatomy practical. 35%. She’s a straight-A student and she couldn’t even manage a passing grade. She only scraped a C in the last Foundations of Clinical assignment. The only thing she can think to do is throw herself at it harder, and she’s already giving it all she’s got, isn’t she? Bad question to ask when she’s sitting on a rooftop at 1am adjusting the tripod of her telescope. She could lose sleep more productively sitting in bed watching up-close videos of open heart surgery. The stars won’t take her anywhere. But sometimes they make the grind easier to bear. Tomorrow, she’ll throw herself at it again. Tonight, Rosario peers into her telescope and seeks out Lyra. It’s one of her favourite constellations. Lyra the lyre, tucked sedately between its much larger neighbours. If you asked her what was so special about it, she might tell you that within this otherwise small, dim asterism dwells the brilliant blue-white Vega, the second-brightest star in the northern sky, so bright that the brightness of other stars is measured against it. She might tell you about the Ring Nebula, a stunningly beautiful nebula formed from the remnant matter of a red giant star now dwindled to a barely-detectable white dwarf. She might tell you about Beta Lyrae, which contains a binary pair orbiting one another so tightly that matter flows freely from one component to the other and the mutual gravitation forces alter the shape of each. She would not tell you that some people shine like Vega; they make a small, dim world seem brighter. She wouldn’t tell you that the Ring Nebula’s vibrant corona, tinged crimson by nitrogen and sulphur, is through some lenses the same red that crowns one such person’s head. She wouldn’t tell you that distances in space are impossibly vast and sometimes, sometimes it’s just lonely being a single-star system. She doesn’t have the vocabulary for such things. She’s never been poetically inclined. And anyway, she’s not sentimental, remember? She likes Lyra because it’s a cool constellation. It’s got nothing to do with any other Lyras she knows. Even if the two are inextricably entwined in her memory. It’s been a while since she’s been able to get a good fix on Lyra. The constellation, not the person. (Well… both, now she thinks of it.) The last few time she’s been up here, she’s had trouble getting a fix on it. Either it’s obscured by cloud, or smothered by light pollution, or she just can’t bring it into focus. One perfectly clear, dark night she became convinced there was something wrong with the lens (while her hindbrain screamed upon deaf ears, there’s something wrong!!)… the reality is, sometimes it’s just a matter of luck. Luck is with her tonight. Vega shines for her and Beta Lyrae dances and though she can’t perceive the colours of the Ring Nebula, it feels close and vibrant. Leaning back from the eyepiece, Rosario thinks, as she’s thought every other time she’s sought out the constellation, Lyra must be getting back soon. I should text her. Every other time, the thought has slipped through her mind like quicksilver, gone by the time she’s dug her phone out of her pocket. She doesn’t know this. The thought feels as new and spontaneous as it has every other time. But this time, when she swipes her phone unlocked, the thought remains. It’s almost 2am. An ungodly hour for most people, but for Lyra, well, you can never tell what clock she’s going to be running on. So she taps out a message.
You’re back soon, right? Taking the scenic route home?
|