Space, nothing, and vacuum are sisters. They describe the pocket of darkness matter resides in. And that pocket will remain silent because it is lacking a medium for the sound waves to travel through.

No matter how brightly a star shines, it will never laugh. The moon will never howl. The sun will never sing. And the planets will never hum to their looping ellipsis.

At night, the subway empties

out. The people go home. Or they

go to work. Sleep and money are

essential to their survival;

I rode the subway late at night

with my uncle and mother

our reflections fefracted in the

black glass. Distorted

by the blur;

I looked out the window

past myself. Into the

nothingness. Where are the

stars? I cannot hear them.

There was a time when I laughed so hard chocolate milk came out of my nose.

The Internet recommends you burn ginger candles for the new moon.

It should help you release blockages and ready yourself for change.

It will comfort you too. Help you pretend that you are okay with the blackness of the night sky. That it does not remind you of an end but of a beginning.

There was a time when I rode my bike through my neighborhood in the summer heat.

I noticed the flecks of white stone in the alloyed pavement. A tangible sky.

I closed my eyes as I rode, laughing into the darkness of closed lids.

NASA cannot reach an exact number of stars in the universe; instead, they have chosen to confidently state that there are a zillion: an uncountable number.

I think that maybe they’d be able to calculate an exact amount if they could hear the stars laugh.

Space, nothing, and vacuum

remind me of a goodbye. The kind of

goodbye that is filled with a

hug. It’s a long

hug and a tight

hug. Because there is nothing

left for us

to say.

Burn a ginger candle.

I parked my bike in my driveway and fished cherry popsicles out of the freezer. The red sugar bled down my hands. I licked the drips from my arms to prevent them from staining the asphalt and its white flecks below.

Scientists do, however, know that in five months two houseflies in perfect health would produce 191,010,000,000,000,000,000 houseflies, enough to cover the planet several meters deep.

They know this because they can hear houseflies buzz. They buzz in the key of F.

We have become astronauts

floating in the middle of space.

We can see the houseflies

begin to turn the Earth. Distorted

by the perpetual

blur. Behind me

it is black. I can

hear the flies

buzz.

Flies fly down to the asphalt to sop up the red Popsicle juice.

In comparison to the human tongue, the feet of a housefly are 10 million times more

sensitive to sugar.

They land on the white dots, covering the stars, buzzing in the key of F.

I cannot hear the stars.

Now that we are in space,

we can’t speak. There is

no medium for a

goodbye to

travel through only

a vacuum.

There was a time when we were just kids.

In space, there is

nothing for the

ginger candle to

comfort. It can’t

breathe.

In a vacuum, there is nothing surrounding molecules.

They become confused and bond together. After this, nothing can break them apart.

With nothingness comes permanence.

We take off our astronaut suits,

and hug. Our cells forget they are

separate.