Towards The Stars by Lisa Feng

[Featured Story]

Space is many things: it is the dimensions of everything, it is having the freedom to live as one pleases, it is the area which is unoccupied by anything and nothing but air.

It is also the starry vastness of the vacuum that surrounds us, dotted by stars and dust; it is long and loud and eternal, forever and never, born from a ripple in time and inflating like a hot balloon, dictated by strange laws that push and pull miniscule amounts of matter into their positions in an unending cosmos.

Space is nothing, but it is also something because humanity has given it a definition and brought it into existence with their words.

John, poor undergrad college student, does not think about any of this. The only thing he has space in his mind for is that he has a creative writing piece due on it in 4 days.

His eye twitches as he continues his aggressive one-sided staring contest with a blank word document (outside the standard MLA heading, because doing that is coded into muscle memory since middle school). Nothing happens, because unfortunately one has to type words into a doc to make them appear.

John’s eye twitches again, and he quietly debates to himself whether he should punt the computer out his window or just bang it against the desk until it breaks. He can’t think of a good idea with actual coherency and a plot.

Instead, John sighs and breaks his internal turmoil to make some instant ramen, because repairing broken laptops is not something he wants to consider in his budget this month.

Some time later, after he decides to give up on the doc and start on that Comp Sci assignment he’s been procrastinating on, he hears a knock at his dorm door. His friend Oliver’s voice breaks the silence, “Oi! John, brought you the 8-pack beer as the apology for last week!”

John doesn’t feel bothered to get up. He has better things to do, like anything else, instead of actually talking to people. He settles comfortably into his chair, careful not to make a creaking noise.

“Uh...if you’re not here...oh I feel stupid.” John feels half-tempted to yell back and agree with the statement and give up the game. It’s when he waits for Oliver's footsteps to signify his retreats does he hear the loud ‘ping!’ from his phone of a message, presumably Oliver notifying John of his gift.

Guess he forgot to mute it. Oops.

“Oh John, open the door! I know you’re hiding in there!” sing-songs Oliver. John sighs in defeat and trudges over to unlock it.

Oliver delightedly barges in with a pack of beer and some Chinese takeout. “I knew you were ignoring me! Just like that One Time with the fish and how you chose to ignore my texts.”

John rolls his eyes fondly and bites back with a, “Ah- ah- ah, we don’t talk about that One Time With The Fish.”

Oliver grins and turns back to the subject at hand. “So me, Liam, Cassie, and the rest of us decided we had to apologize for uh- trashing your room last week and I volunteered to bring you this 8-pack we scraped together.”

“Oh.” John blinks. “Thanks and send my regards to the rest of them. Tell Cassie I’m still pissed at her for the permanent marker. Now, shoo.” John proceeds to push Oliver out the door, but to no avail.

“Hey!” Oliver quirks up an eyebrow in a question. “What’s with the hurry?”

After some time, when Oliver stubbornly refuses to budge and continues to stand there, John finally starts, “So. You know how I majored in CS ‘cause I thought it would be better in college? Turns out, it’s literally just like high school. But somehow the food issue is even worse.”

Oliver shrugs and crunches on a potato chip. “Wow, picking a major you don’t like. And then suffering. Shocking.” In the seconds while John was distracted talking about his problems, Oliver had already snaked his way to John’s snack cabinet and stolen a bag.

“Thanks for your incredible and unending support of me,” snarks John, with an added eyeroll for effect. “No, I actually do like CS. It’s just, my God, if I see another forum post of a specific issue and then that person replying “fixed” without detailing the answer, I’m breaking my coffee machine in half- hey, stop laughing at my problems!”

Oliver finishes his cackling, “Sorry, sorry. Just change majors man. Alicia changed it last year.”

At the confused expression on John’s face, Oliver explains, “Alicia, the overly competitive one back at our high school, the one that majored in chem on a bet. Ended up transferring to business some time ago and I’m sure she’s having plenty of fun terrorizing crusty old businessmen now.”

“Huh,” John intelligently manages, “Neat.”

“…”

Their awkward silence is broken by Oliver’s phone ringing and his face comically whitening with a hushed whisper of “Oh God, I forgot to pick up my girlfriend at the stop.” He then proceeds to run out of John's room faster than what should have been humanly possible, dropping the bag of chips he stole from John.

Finally, blessed silence. John closes the door and tries to go back to crawling his way through lines of code. He polishes off the Chinese takeout Oliver left behind and cracks open one of the beers in the 8-pack. Still cold, at least.

The sun inches downwards and one beer turns to two. And two turns to three, because somehow John forgot this was alcohol (even if it was the very cheap and diluted kind) and not coffee. And halfway through his third, he finally closes his laptop and collapses on his bed, dead to the world. And he dreams-

(of the most beautiful night sky, freckled with stars that spilt like shining crystals from a velvet twilight palm, a pale brush of clouds of nebulous dust so very far away.

The stars are so very beautiful, but they are also brimming with raw energy, singing of hopes and dreams and wonderful things they have and have not seen. They are so beautiful and so bright and John is so, so hungry. In a trance, John plucks the brightest one he can see with his thumb and forefinger and pops it into his mouth. It leaves a pleasant fizzing sensation and the thrum of electric power down to his fingertips.

A small part of John remembers his grandma scolding him for eating too many sweets and then getting a stomach ache after.

But oh, the every other part of him in the dream vibrated with the need to consume, because the stars are right there and an irresistible free meal full of fire and song, and he starts picking off the stars until he gets impatient and combs entire constellations off the sky at a time-

It’s finally when the voracious haze that clouds John’s mind dissipates after being fed so many stars, does he look up at the night sky and sees...nothing. It’s just a cold black void that greets him, with a smattering of lonely stars at the edges that escaped him during that strange fervor.

He looks away in some sort of strange shame and sees there’s no one besides him on the grass, not even Gran, who taught him the names of so many stars and constellations.

Oh.

It crashes down on him all at once, Gran who taught him the constellations, and he devoured Leo and Draco whole. Gran who taught him the name of the stars, and the first one he ate was Sirius A, the brightest star. Gran who told him never to eat so many sweets because his stomach would hurt and now it did. And, wow, did his stomach hurt he feels like vomiting and then-)

John wakes up ungracefully. His stomach hurts and he flops to the side and vomits out the alcohol.

Under the soft glistening moonlight, his sleep-addled mind, and that completely unbidden dream there comes and goes a moment where he thinks, “Did I just throw up the stars I ate?” before promptly passing out again.

A few minutes or so later the smell of bile and beer starts becoming unbearable under his nose. He groggily drags himself up and heads to the bathroom to clean up. A quick peek at his phone- wow the hangover made his phone even at lowest brightness sting his eyes- 5am. Delightful. Might as well get up now and capitalize on an early breakfast and some cramming before morning classes.

~

He chugs a glass of water and chastises himself about drinking on nights before classes. The cafe always has a suffocating smell of pumpkin spice, and since John still had the lingering echo of a hangover he decidedly did not want to deal with that today. He heads towards the library shortly after class.

After a few hours of chipping away at work and researching he finally looks up, only to realize: Huh, he’s in the astronomy section.

John thinks of the dream the night before as he fingers through the wild array of books, with names and titles he half recognizes from his curiosity-filled research and what Gran taught him as a child.

John opens one of the textbooks, “Introduction to Modern Astrophysics”. As he starts reading, he finds himself not understanding anything except a few basic concepts. But he’s drawn in all the same, and minutes turn to hours as he flips through pages, absorbing its contents.

When John looks up, it’s almost closing time. He shelves the textbook and walks back to his dorm.

It’s only when he gets back did he realize he forgot to eat dinner today, and he checks his snack stashyep, Oliver really went and stole his last bag of chips yesterday. It’s getting late and John’s too lazy to go to a convenience store to refill, so he forgoes the idea of eating tonight entirely. Instead he decides to go to bed a bit earlier to avoid hunger pangs and fix his sleeping schedule (really, John’s fixing his sleeping schedule. The world must be coming to an end).

When John’s head hits his pillow, he starts dreaming

(of the faint scent of mud and grass brushing past his senses.

His shoes squish on the grass, ground softened from autumn rains. Between coarse and summer-hardened blades, patches of soft fresh grass peeks out.

John looks to his side. There were the stepping stones, whose river they rested in playfully gurgled in the summer. There were the wildflowers, which made him sneeze but he liked the bugs that rested in them. There were the fireflies, like tiny whizzing stars which he tried (unsuccessfully) to catch as a child.

It’s so beautiful and nostalgic.

But then he looks up and the night is black starless void.

“Hello?” says Gran’s voice coming from behind him. When he looks behind him, it’s a residential facility.

The night is cold. It’s dark, and the fireflies are gone. There are no stars in the sky, and she opens her mouth and asks, shaking, afraid of John,

“Who are you?”)

John wakes up in cold sweat.

~

“Wow, John,” Liam plops down next to John in the cafeteria. “You look like garbage.”

“Thanks.” John snips back. He forgot to eat last night and today he ate probably more than he should. Ah well, it was fine. Now he would have to remember to purchase some snacks, as long as Liam didn’t decide to bother him and drag him off to God-knows-where before class.

Unfortunately, Liam, Idiot-Who-Caused-The-Fish-Inciden t, is a nosey loser just like Oliver. He opens his big mouth and says, “Did you not sleep again?”

“No.” John rolls his eyes. “I’ve been trying to fix my sleep schedule. Just had a nightmare, that’s all.”

Liam snorts. “What are you, five?”

“No, just thought of my Gran.” John muttered, he kept his eyes firmly on his mashed potatoes.

“Eh, isn’t she dea-. Oh! Oh. I’m sorry for bringing that up.” Thank God, Liam at least knew about lines he shouldn’t cross.

John sighs. “It’s not a problem, you’re forgiven. I just don’t like thinking about it.”

Liam nods in understanding. “Well. Er, change of topic, you got the apology gift from Oliver right?”

Their conversation of idle chit chat concluded shortly after, with Liam luckily not dragging John away on an impromptu adventure across campus.

After that, John headed back to the library to continue reading astronomy textbooks, because hey, they really were very interesting. But he’s tired from lack of sleep, and he had a pretty hearty breakfast, and the words started swimming across the page, and

(he dreams of the smell of crisp autumn air, the smell of mud. He dreams of the gentle waft of warm butterscotch and lemon creams that Gran would try to feed him and call him so small statured! Goodness Maria, what are you feeding your son, John come here and eat-

Sometimes, Gran forgot to bake muffins, even though John remembered that from his first memory til’ that point they had never missed a day without notifying her in advance. She was pleasantly surprised some weeks as if she hadn’t remembered they would come at all.

But one time, Gran forgot about the muffins the week, and then the week after, and then the week after that. He and his parents laughed it off, and Gran did too, because it was just old age nibbling away at little things. But there was the growing fear, that terrible no-good bad feeling that sits deep in John’s gut that his 10 year old self could never verbalize properly but was brave enough to say with full confidence that something bad was going to happen.

One time, he remembers going to a hospital and a doctor told his parents that his Gran had something that started with an A and ended with ‘mers. Something about forgetting things (only now does he know what it was, it was Alzheimer's).

His parents visit Gran more and more and he starts getting to go to those visits less and less, especially after that time his mother comes home sobbing, moaning “she forgot my name, she forgot my name.”

He is a little older and wiser than he was a few years ago but not so much when he visits her for the second-last time. The way she looked at him in fear, and asked him who he was. It was too much.

But the last time John goes to visit, before Gran is about to die, he hesitates.

She probably couldn’t understand him anyway, he reasons to himself. She forgot all about him anyway, he thinks. And in the end, he finds himself with all sorts of things to say but absolutely nothing that can be said eloquently, and so he resigns himself to saying nothing at all.

He regrets and regrets and now John’s a little older and wiser so he opens his mouth to talk to Gran behind him, even if it is a dream.

Instead he heaves, beautiful blue-black sky and stars pouring out his mouth and drowning out any noise he planned to make.

No, no, no he frantically thinks. Please. I want to say something. Anything. Even a goodbye is enough.

When he looks up, she’s gone. The residential facility in his dream has crumbled away like fine stardust, and John is on the gentle plains. There’s no one besides him, only the starless ink black night and the sound of the breeze, darting across the grass and whistling the sounds of a flute.)

When he wakes up in the library from his nap, he walks back to the dorm, but John somehow finds himself even more tired than in his nap. The astronomy textbooks that he’s been reading in the past two days have somehow been more interesting than the CS courses he’s taken in two years of high school.

John is so, so tired, bone-deep fatigued and tired of nothing and everything. If he has to continue the monotony of university life, doing CS, which he likes but does not love, surviving but not living, he’s going to either explode or wilt away.

John opens his computer but he doesn’t do anything. There’s no point. Why put all these hours of research when there’s nothing worth doing. Comp is fun but it’s not his passion, and while he could live with doing it his whole life, who's to say he would enjoy doing it? Would he really?

He doesn’t do anything for hours, all throughout the night. It’s 8am when he finally shakes himself out of his existential crisis. Vaguely, he wonders if he’ll have the dream again. He wonders if he’ll see the ghost of his Gran again. He wonders what he could have said, and what he could say now even in his dreams.

Well, his sleep schedule is garbage but he doesn’t have class tomorrow, might as well worsen it by sleeping through the day.

He collapses onto his bed and concedes himself to

(the dream, but this time he isn’t standing in the field under a void. He’s flying, high, high above everything, above the grass where the wind whistled like a quiet flute, above the air which smelled of crisp autumn and innocence, above even the lilting melody of the stars of things they have and have not seen. It is so, so beautiful and so familiar and he wants to cry.

One moment, he is flying, and the next, he is in a hospital. John speaks for the first and last time to her, “Gran…”

“Thank you for everything.”

It expresses absolutely nothing but it was the thing he wanted to say the most, and it was better than never speaking at all and living with the guilt of it.

Gran smiles and she says, “Good on you for speaking up, dearie.”

But it’s not Gran’s voice that comes out of her mouth, it’s a warped version of his own and what he thought she must have sounded like, because oh God, he forgot what her voice sounded like, didn’t he?

“Gran,” he tries, but this time Grandma is the one who shushes him.

“Shoot for the moon, and even if you don’t make it, you’ll still be among the stars,” her stardust-woven memory says, and then she’s gone.

Reality bends and the hospital disappears in a blink. He’s again, flying high in the void, staring down at the grass plains, power thrumming under his skin. He unfurls his wings and the stars he consumed stretch across the sky and splay over the ink-black night, covering it in galaxies and celestial lights.

He flaps his wings once, twice, unsure of himself. He’s seized with a sudden fear that he’s going to fall but he grits his teeth and reminds himself: trying is better than doing nothing at all.

John beats his wings made of starlight and soars.)

When John wakes up from his nap the first thing he notices is that it’s 8PM. The second thing he notices is his alarm set to crunch the stupid creative piece for English in four hours.

This time, he opens his computer and cracks his knuckles and doesn’t think about making a nice topic related to space. He picks the first thing he can think of, some high school girl named Lisa trying to rush a creative piece for Extra Credit. It’s quick. It’s incredibly stupid and meta but he doesn’t care. Going all out is better than trying, but trying is better than doing nothing at all, no?

He polishes off the piece in one sit-down and runs it through Grammarly. He submits at 11:56PM and steps back to marvel at all the words that filled the black space of a word doc when he refused to start on anything that wasn't a perfect idea.

In the next few days, John consults a couple of people about transferring from CS. His parents, some of his friends, he digs through forums. Not that consultation was much a factor since his mind was already made up from the start. It just needed a little push, a leap of faith.

For a second, he hesitates. After Oliver knows, the gossip he inevitably spreads will socially pressure him to never turn back. Does he want to transfer to Astronomy?

He thinks of grueling hours pouring over C++ and years wasted if he changes to a major he hardly knows much about on a whim, because of a few thought-provoking dreams in the span of a week. John thinks and thinks, and decides, he can change majors again if the stars don’t cut out for him.

Well. No going back now, John thinks as he presses the call button.

“Hey Oliver- I was wondering if you could give me Alicia’s number. No, no I don’t want a date with her, look. Yeah. I was actually thinking of transferring majors and the university webpages are being particularly unhelpful, so I wanted some first-hand...”

[Fin]