#36: Socks

Some days I feel like jumping into a black hole, just to know what it’d be like. Possibly like getting drawn and quartered by a million horses forever. Or maybe more like a peppercorn sinking down the mill until being ground to dust by a swift flick of the wrist.

Maria is on the couch gazing out the window, fiddling with a hole in her sock. I lent her those socks just over a week ago when she needed a clean pair and I told her the only condition was that she bring them back in person. She’s been here everyday except Sunday since then. On Sundays she goes for dinner and a walk with her mother and they talk about her job interviews and maybe also about me.

The article in the paper says that black holes are the closest thing we have to a master clock, a universal time. The church bells are great for tracking the half hours I spend waiting for sleep to come, but they can’t hold a candle to Gaia BH1. Gaia BH1 is the closest system to us that contains a black hole. It orbits a star not too different from our Sun at a distance of 1560 lightyears from my artificial turf and my decaying grill. It’s a binary system; the solitary star orbits the black hole and the black hole orbits itself and so they also orbit each other until the star inevitably gets swallowed by the hole and absorbed into 1) infinite nothingness (singularity) or 2) a replay montage of all conversations that should’ve gone differently.

Maria gives me a puzzled stare and stops fiddling. I suspect that she has just asked me a question and is awaiting response. She probably made a comment about the maine coon passing by or that I should really consider putting the table back a meter or two so it opens up the space more. If she did, I could get away with a reassuring smile and blink but I’ve burned my hands too many times so I say

“What? Sorry, I was caught up in this article.”

“I just saw the maine coon getting chased by the black cat, the fat one. She’s faster than you’d think.”

“Yeah, she is.” I throw in the smile but leave out the blink. It would be overkill.

“What’s the article about?”

“It’s about black holes and how they’re basically the master unit of time in the universe. They’re building a new telescope called Event Horizon which is supposed to take the most detailed photos yet and then they’ll be able to trace back whole histories of planets and stars just from one good photo.”

“Oh, cool. Kind of like a night vision camera?”

"No, more like a camera with the slowest shutter ever. Days or weeks I think. I hope they make prints of the photos. I’ve been meaning to get a clock to hang on the wall anyway.”

She doesn’t get the joke and I can’t be bothered to explain it so I go back to reading and in the corner of my eye I see her readjust and pick up her phone. After a paragraph about Einstein and his theory of relativity I’m interrupted by a three minute voice memo played at double speed erupting through her phone speaker. A detailed account of her friend’s first date and how he couldn’t get it up because they drank too much natural wine and he was nervous because it had been a long time. He proposed a lunch date this weekend but she already has a date planned that evening so would that make her a bad person?

I get up to brush my teeth and stumble over Maria’s tote bag. On my bedroom floor are two pairs of jeans, a light cotton summer dress with too many flowers on it, an odd number of socks and at least four shirts I know aren’t mine. My toothpaste isn’t in its usual place so I walk back and ask her if she’s seen it and she points at the sink while she incoherently debates the ethics of two dates in a day into her phone. In the left corner of the sink is a dried stain of toothpaste, kind of in the shape of frog’s head, looking straight at me. I’m puzzled by how the toothpaste and spit ended up here while her toothbrush is still in the bathroom. Without making eye contact, I pick up the tube and walk back.

Her mumbling is muffled by the whirr of my electric toothbrush and when I’m done I let the shower run so I can shit in peace. I want to finish reading my article but more than that I want her to leave. The war is not lost but the way she’s gaining territory makes me think the ghost of Genghis Khan is perched on her shoulder whispering devious tactics into her ear. It’s only two days until Sunday, maybe I can hold out until then and think of an excuse to ask back my spare key. My own reflection in the mirror catches me by surprise and the absurdity of it all hits me. She has my only spare key and I can’t even say with full certainty what her last name is.

I turn the shower knob to 38 degrees and step in. I think about what it must have been like a few centuries years ago. When the sailors of the exploration age looked out at the horizon, figured they’d probably fall off at the end but thought ‘'fuck it, it’s not my boat anyway.’’

Now that horizon is a black hole and fuck it, it’s not my shuttle anyway. Let Bezos or Musk freeze my body, upload my conscience to Google Drive and shoot me off in an air locked escape pod. And then 1560 light years later, when I start thawing and feel the pull of a million horses, the montage will play and I’ll hear myself say

“It’s okay, you can keep them.”