Buzzfeed, Boys, Black Magic

the furry in animal science

"My advice is to open your chakras." Janice twisted her arms like some pastiche of a Bollywood dancer. "I learned that at the temple."

She kicked up one of her legs so high that the two-thousand-and-four-era peasant skirt she was wearing threatened to reveal her panties. As frightening as a prospect that was, I was more afraid her yoga practice would upset the break room table. I clutched my ramen.

"Chakras, Mary-Beth," Janice repeated. "The grand arcana, the esoteric sublime-"

"Do I look like a Mary-Beth?" Janice was the first person to mistake me for a Mary-Beth. I've gotten Parminder and Maria plenty of times before, but never Mary-Beth.

 "Even Dr. Moreno senses how closed off you are," Janice said. "She's one day from jumping off the ledge, so you gotta see how bad you must be."

"Look, I like a suicide joke as much as the next psychopath," I admitted, "but maybe we shouldn't joke about our boss killing herself while we're at work? She's not well-"

"You two are peas in a pod," Janice said. "You think so hard trying to justify this astrophysics tripe to yourself that you're getting wrinkles." She pressed her fingertips to her forehead and pulled upward as if she were feigning a facelift.

"I don't have wrinkles." I knew should have bought the anti-aging serum I saw half-off online on my birthday.

"Your youth is fading fast."

She stood with her arms held straight above her head, her palms touching. Then she dropped her left arm incrementally, in a clock-wise motion toward the ground, all the while ticking and tocking with her tongue.

I sat there for about thirty seconds longer than I should have.

When I couldn't stand it anymore, I picked up my cup of ramen and headed for the breakroom door.

"If you start opening your chakra's today," Janice called after me, "you might be reincarnated as a Redwood tree!"

***

I wasn't supposed to, but I decided to take the rest of my thirty-minute lunch break in the planetarium. I turned down the lights, flicked on the "Night Sky" show, and nestled into a plush seat in the amphitheater's third row. I didn't want to listen to the canned narration track, but I didn't feel like messing around with the projector to figure out how to mute it. Instead, I popped in my headphones and put on a chill Brian Eno tune.

I watched the constellations spread across the ceiling and remembered the little coloring book astronomical charts my Mom bought me as a kid. As I watched each hero, or animal, or wicked queen tumble out of the fishnet of stars above me, I repeated to myself their origin stories- their triumphs and their tragic flaws, the reasons why the gods immortalized them in the heavens.

I thought then that time has a way of blinding you to detail. Back when I first colored in Orion's belt I could recite his entire lineage. When I finished my astrophysics degree, I could at least tell you whether it was Gaia or Artemis who sent the scorpion to sting him. And now, the most I could recall for certain was that the huntsman died after a thrash of that scorpion's tail, a punishment for boasting that he could kill every creature on Earth. The moral of the story, I decided, was that you mustn't dream too big. Don't take things too far. Stay in your lane, avoid the carrot and the stick, and you won't be pricked by any scorpion's stinger.

I wondered if my childhood obsession with stars and myths and planets was a symptom of an undiagnosed case of autism. I'd look up at those far away pin-points of light, and hope that somewhere, across the vast chasm of space that lay gaping before me, there was an alien who felt the same way I did. That everyone around us spoke just a little differently than we could. That, even upon careful study of each idiom and flutter of eyelash, the best we could hope to do was understand every other word we heard. We'd live as perpetual foreigners in our home countries.