Topographical Map of the Milky Way Galaxy
Now, we spend summers smoking cigarettes on the beach
and improvising cocktails from the 20s, which we shake and drink
from clear plastic tumblers. They are not microwave safe, and neither
are we, and try as I might, I can’t remember my formative years
as keenly as I’d like to; and when I bring that up in conversation,
we take turns wondering about the future and how we’ll remember
sitting here, in pink plastic deck chairs, talking about the sky,
and the particulars of the Milky Way: how bright and eager
it looks in the naked night sky, stretched out over a black horizon
of crashing waves; how its edges looks better in infrared, painted
in reds and pinks instead of the murky blues and yellows that our
eyes assign to it; how we’re not at the center, but instead spiraling
around its galactic core, in the orbit of the Local Spur; and how it’s expanding,
accelerating at some alarming rate calculated by physicists and
confounded by conspiracy theorists and stoners, all of whom sit around
large tables and pontificate on how long we’ve got left, how long it’ll
take until the Galaxy spirals out of control and destroys itself. We
decide that we’re racing it to the bottom.
