Venus

On the Thanksgiving week of my sophomore year in high school, I took my first trip alone on an airplane. It wasn’t a very long trip; only to Syracuse, New York, and only about 30 minutes of the plane actually floating. I liked it because the flight attendants were really nice to me, and I had some really great music on my very first iPod touch. I got to sit in a window seat with no one beside me. The plane was Southwest, and the smallest one I remember.

            It was one of many Thanksgivings of being with my dad and stepmom’s family, but the specific details of what I remember from each individual Thanksgiving blur together. I think of some turkey and Christmas music infused holiday. I think of Brussels sprouts coated in butter, and falling asleep on the couch as my dad played consecutive games of Call of Duty on his MacBook. The two dogs were there a couple different years.

            But the importance of my sophomore year was my significant involvement in my life at home. I don’t remember if I had yet learned the song “Hello Seattle” by Owl City on the piano, but I was in that frame of mind. Of course I learned it for someone else; the only other time I enjoyed playing the piano was each time my grandfather requested I play a rousing rendition of the Cancan as he entered my house. But whatever I had accomplished at the time, I distinctly remember the incredible butterflies that came to me when I posted on some boy’s wall and he responded. I was somebody, a somebody he noticed.

            I think that I’ve always been the type of person who craves a very specific type of attention. It’s gotten in the way of my relationships sometimes, and yet I haven’t ever changed. Today? Well, I haven’t thought about learning a song on the piano for someone else in a long time. I haven’t felt butterflies like I did that Thanksgiving. At least not butterflies that I’m sure about. I’ve very rarely felt as sure about anything as I felt about him that Thanksgiving. And yes, I was young, and I was wrong. Romanticizing something I really didn’t know much about was my specialty, but it was something that really did make me feel like myself.

            I could speculate, but for some reason, watching my dad play Call of Duty for a few hours wasn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world. My relationship with him has always been this strange, complicated thing. I’m not always his first choice; I believe I’ve made as much peace as I can with that.

            But it’s this strange operant conditioning: I’m ceaselessly attracted to the sometimes. He never threw his affection at me, didn’t reliably include my interests. I was better than my stepmother, but not by much. I never fought for his attention, but I never truly had it.

            One year my dad brought his telescope to Thanksgiving in Syracuse. There wasn’t a perfectly clear night until Saturday, the day before we left to come back to Maryland. I don’t remember if it had snowed or not. Somehow we were standing in the grass, and the consecutive minutes of waiting for an amateur to get a somewhat clear view of one of the planets had sent everyone except me inside. I was willing to wait for him. The way he seemed to value the stars was beautiful enough for me to stay.

            He finally focused in on something after a while. I don’t remember, maybe it was Venus. He motioned for me to come look and I looked, shifted my entranced feelings toward the stars. It was just some greenish blob, but for a moment I convinced myself I could see what he saw, could understand what he loved. He didn’t tell me to look away, but I did so with an understanding. He put his eye back on the eyepiece without looking at me. I could see the white of his teeth against the yellow of the moon (or maybe it was Venus.) This was something he loved. He appeared to have found himself among the stars.

            I wouldn’t say I identified with him in that moment. It wasn’t our moment to be together. But for whatever reason, I stood there and watched him as if he were Venus. I understood him to be what was in the sky, let myself be pulled further out of gravity’s orbit with each passing minute.